BABY BOOMER BABBLE
CALLING IT QUITS
The baby boomers have started retiring. In fact, the
very first baby boomer, born one minute after midnight, January 1, 1946,
recently applied for social security benefits. An estimated 10,000 people a day
will become eligible for social security benefits over the next two decades.
And retirement at age 62 will be the clear favorite.
The average age for retirement has already dropped to
age 57. Some have saved enough money; others had retirement thrust upon them by
being fired, or their jobs moving to Mexico or China. Still others retire for
health reasons. I retired due to health reasons and disgust for where the field
and agency I worked for were headed.
So by age 62, IÕll be in line to start my social
security payments. Otherwise, I would have to wait until age 65 and 9 months.
So do the math. It would be stupid of me to wait. IÕve talked to a lot of
boomers who intend on doing the exact same thing. One drawback is having health
insurance, between age 62 and the start of Medicare, at age 65. That leaves
approximately 3 years of no coverage, unless your spouse is still working, or
you have coverage provided by your retirement plan, a concept which is almost
extinct. But guess what? We boomers are in control. Hello universal
health-care. You can bet the winner of the 2008 election will have a proposal.
WeÕll demand it!
Unlike previous generations, retirement is not about
quitting anything other that the job(s) you have done over the last 20-30
years. Many of those jobs have disappeared anyway. In my particular case, it
had changed so much that I could hardly recognize it. So itÕs out with the old,
and in with the new. A liberation. A personal revolution of sorts.
The question becomes: Now what? You may have one day,
one year, 10 years, twenty years or more,
to plan for. It is almost like another lifetime. A post official job
period. It occurs to me that the one thing you donÕt want to do is what you
did. So why not try something new? Get rid of the inept managers, the deadline
pressures, the alarm clock, the time clock. Kick some butt, the major
difference being now you can do it on your own terms.
IÕve been retired for a year already. I still donÕt
have it quite figured out. I spend more time writing, which I enjoy. I
developed a blog site, which is fun. I spend more time watching and managing
our investments, which has been productive. We bought a retirement home, where
I spend some time, mainly pulling weeds, cleaning the gutters, and playing
golf. I donÕt necessarily feel overly compelled to help other people, since I
did that for a living, although I have been giving some thought to starting a
restaurant, bakery, soup kitchen, living quarters combination to train the
jobless and house the homeless while learning a marketable skill.
So, IÕm floundering a bit. Each day I feel I get a
little closer to understanding it-it being retirement, and what to do with for the rest of my life, however long
or short that may be. I need whatever it will be to be relevant, idealistic,
and above all, contrary to conventional wisdom. ThatÕs the boomer way. We are
the dreamers. We stopped a war, put blacks into places and jobs where they had
never been, and removed Presidents from office who were not representing our
interests. The day after Kent State, a group of us took over the office of the
President of SIU. While I was sitting at his desk, I had this overwhelming
feeling that we had done something good, something to show the world that we
were angry, unhappy with the way things were going. That we were not going to
be satisfied with Ōbusiness as usual.Ķ IÕm getting that same feeling about
retirement. IÕm getting an itch to sit at that desk again.