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Unretirement:
How Baby Boomers Are Changing the Way We Think about Work,
Community, and the Good Life
by Chris Farrell
c.2014, Bloomsbury
$26.00 / $30.00 Canada
256 pages
By Terri Schlichenmeyer
The Truth Contributor
For much of your employed life, you dreamed about not having
to work.
Retirement would be great. It would stretch out for years, a
horizon with no alarm clock and no deadlines. What will you
do with it?
Chances are, says author Chris Farrell, believe it or
not, you’ll go to work. And in his new book
Unretirement, he says you’ll do it because you
want to, not because you have to.
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It’s a statistic that has some politicians very worried:
within the next 15 years, say demographers, the 65-plus
population of America will be nearly equivalent to the
current population of New York, California and Texas
combined. That’s a lot of retirees and a fortune paid
out in benefits.
For quite some time, though, economists and pessimists have
expressed doubts that Social Security will even be around
then. Others bemoan the amount of retirement savings that
many Baby Boomers (the age group retired or soon retiring)
don’t have. According to Farrell, however, these fears
ignore the fact that most Boomers are re-thinking the way
retirement will work for them.
He says that Boomers’ “last third of life is being
reimagined and reinvented into ‘unretirement.’” They are,
for instance, looking at Social Security as a supplement,
rather than a sole income – and even then, they’re putting
off collecting it. That’s the way it should be, says
Farrell: Social Security is sound – it only needs “some
tweaks to shore up its finances for the long haul” – but
because of longer lifespans and better health, retirees
should be encouraged to file later, unless they absolutely
can’t wait.
And those late filers? They’re seeing work in a whole
different way: the rate of senior entrepreneurship is up,
and so is gradual retirement. They’re staying on the job
longer, are finding second (or even third) careers, or are
volunteering. And despite that age discrimination can be a
real issue, many workplaces have finally recognized the
experience and reliability of older workers who are, in many
cases, perfectly happy with part-time jobs. In short,
Boomers have been “behind many changes in the workplace over
the past four decades,” and they’re definitely not done.
Your IRA is fat and you like it that way. But how, when the
time comes, will you use it? Read “Unretirement,” and you
might have a different answer to that question.
With intriguing statistics and a thoughtful tone, author
Chris Farrell pooh-poohs pundits who decry the viability of
Social Security and avow the belief that
retirement-resistant seniors take jobs from younger workers
by showing that doom-and-gloom prophesies and myths aren’t
warranted or true. Along the way, he examines healthcare and
the ACA, aging, home ownership, mentorship with (and from)
younger workers, the history of retirement itself, and how
other countries perceive their “gray revolution.”
While I’d say that this book is absolutely for Boomers, it’s
also, surprisingly, something that Gen X’ers should check
out, too. If you’ve already retired, are about to, or have
worked all your life so you don’t have to work someday,
Unretirement is unmissable. |
