The HR Doctor is in - Sept. 21, 2015

Retiring from the Fray Without Becoming Frayed

The HR Doctor recently had the great opportunity to have breakfast with three colleagues with whom he had worked for many years. Working together years ago now seems like the far distant past.

These three ladies were several years into their retirement, and breakfast was a great opportunity to hug and catch up on what their retirement lives look like.

Are we ever really ready for retirement? The answer in general is “no.” We might plan and take advantage of the many television commercials about investment opportunities. We might even think we are ready. However, several factors can create a wide gulf between our planning and the reality we may find. These factors can jump out at us in ways we might not expect.

The first dose of reality is that, laws of physics notwithstanding, we have indeed mastered time travel. The older one gets the faster time seems to move. The more senior we become, the more we tend to use phrases like “it was only yesterday when…” Or “it seemed like just a little while ago when…”

It is hard to convince very young professionals just beginning their careers that the time to begin plan­ning for the end of their careers may best be found at the beginning of their careers. This seems like an anomaly that is so weird that it is hard to believe.

Because it doesn’t seem to make immediate sense, people are unwilling or unable to wrap their brains around the concept of early planning. Therefore, they don’t. This inertia and the disbelief which drives inaction causes us to lose the very precious opportunities to begin meaningful financial, health and personal security preparation. It also will cause the loss of many chances for greater personal joy later in life.

My three colleagues all had the great fortune to spend decades as participants in a defined benefit (DB) retirement system. They now have the security and stabil­ity of regular, lifelong pension benefits that most members of our species do not have and likely will not have. This is because DB plans are expensive and becoming more so as life expectancy increases and assumptions about investment returns prove to be less accurate than the actuaries predicted.

The result is a wholesale fleeing from defined benefit plans to the less secure (from the employees’ standpoint) and less costly and risky (from the agencies’ standpoint) version of retirement savings — the defined contribution model.

So it is that being in a retire­ment plan with no or few guar­antees puts an added premium on aggressive long-term action by employees to secure their own financial futures. Those who invest as much as they can, as early as they can, in deferred compensation plans, such as those offered through the National Association of Counties, are showing a degree of wisdom and courage (or frugality) which will serve the more elderly version of themselves very well indeed.

In addition to the financial leg of supporting a great retire­ment, there are two others. First there is the health dimension. A retirement full of wonder and amazement, of contribution and of fun needs to be built on a foundation of good health. Good health does not occur in a vacuum or in a bubble. We live in a world of dangers to our health and too often a sense of arrogant immunity from those dangers.

It is possible to live a life of concern for health but also to experience the joy of adventure and reasonable risk-taking. The Rosenberg family’s four African safaris offered us proof of the com­bination of taking precautions while enjoying adventure is quite possible. Life without adventure and a reasonable degree of risk is a life doomed to be boring or perhaps all too “normal.”

The final leg of the great retirement triad should also be implanted very early in our lives — way before our careers even begin. That is learning to under­stand personal risk and taking steps to mitigate those risks. We all face them. The HR Doctor’s considerable security experience gave rise to the mantra “Don’t walk by something wrong!” The practice of not walking by stems from experience as an intelligence officer in a time of terrorist risks and car bombs. No, it wasn’t today, it was decades ago.

We all have the opportunity to take steps right away to iden­tify and reduce risks. It might be around how you secure your home against crimes like burglary or the risks of fire. It certainly may also involve being prudent in those moments in life when you might be at an ATM in the dark of the evening or at a party where the alcohol is flowing like a mighty stream. How you drive home and how you adopt an attitude of prudence and observation around that ATM can be quite important in preventing problems that become disastrous later.

How we teach our children the importance of those three elements of security — financial, health and physical security — plant the seeds for their own positive future.

My three friends responded when I asked them what their typical retirement day looks like. All mentioned sleeping in as late as they wished, engaging in hobbies and maintaining contact with friends. Their responses also included things like recover­ing from the death of a spouse, which was never part of their retirement plan. It also included the hesitant mention about how cancer entered their retirement world without being invited.

As I thought about how I would answer my own question about what a typical day is like after retiring from my “day job,” I chose to mention engaging with other people, the passionate pursuit of hobbies, enjoying the company of the beautiful HR Spouse Charlotte and our two loving, strong and fast K9s. I definitely included ongoing charitable engagement.

If I were to print new business cards, I would love for those cards to say “philanthropist!” I would love my retirement job descrip­tion to include volunteering and hopefully making a difference in the lives of young people. Teaching and lecturing as a volunteer, not to mention active consulting in public administration and human resources, has all happened as a result of advanced planning and paying attention to oppor­tunities that came by — and still do. The best retirements, I have come to learn, involve making choices to engage rather than to retreat.

The word “retire” in military parlance can mean “withdraw.” However, if thought of in the sense of how to live decades more of an amazing life, the notion of withdraw­ing has to be replaced with a different idea. Retire really means moving forward with more opportunities than ever before along with the wisdom that comes from seeing long-held plans, often amended by circumstance, becoming reality.

Phil Rosenberg

The HR Doctor