Attention Baby Boomers. Yes, you 76 million people born between 1946 and 1964. Planning on retiring and enjoying the fruits of your labor?
Get over it.
Plan on semi-retirement, advises Craig S. Karpel, author of “The Retirement Myth,” one of a plethora of new doom-and-gloom books aimed at the Boomer market (HarperCollins).
Visualize a Florida senior citizen, who wants to maintain her pre-retirement lifestyle, including golf, and who has taken a low-paying, part-time job that helps pay for her $4,500 annual green fees.
Or take a page from the Home Shopping Network, which has a “prime time” division that hires retired folks to staff its phone center. HSN helps these seniors monitor earnings so they don’t make enough to to be penalized by a reduction in their Social Security checks.
We must learn to “honor the burger flipper” and similar occupations, Karpel says, because those are jobs that bring in bucks, albeit minimum wages.
“There’s nothing wrong with the $5-an-hour job,” says this serious, fast-talking New York journalist who missed being a Baby Boomer by about 18 months. He acknowledges he began thinking about Boomers and finances in earnest last year when he turned 50.
In his view the idea of not working after age 60-something is a modern-day phenomenon that seems exclusive to the United States, Japan and parts of Europe. Government records show that in 1890, 75 percent of the population over 65 was employed in this country, and the rest were disabled, he said. Today 16 percent of Americans over 65 are in the work force; the figure is 35 percent in Japan.
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And the familiar “three-legged stool”–Social Security benefits, a pension, savings–won’t work for Boomers in retirement as it did for their parents and grandparents, Karpel says.
Taxes will go up; Social Security will be revamped and reduced, plus Boomers can’t collect full benefits until they are 66 or 67, depending on the year they were born. As a group, Boomers’ percentage of savings is very low compared with previous generations. And their pensions may be slim to nil because many will have spread their working lives over several corporations.
What if Boomers have an employer who offers early retirement buyouts for 50-something folks?
Don’t even think about it. Say, ” `No, I love my job. I want to continue working.’ ” counsels Karpel. “What are they going to do? They can’t fire you. That would be age discrimination,” says Karpel, noting that the average judgment in an anti-age discrimination case is $450,000. “Now there’s a retirement!”
But what if such an employer makes a 50-something employee miserable with job switches, nights and weekend hours?
“Miserable? That’s not miserable,” Karpel says. “Miserable was being black in Mississippi in the ’50s, when African-Americans were starving and couldn’t get jobs. Now that’s miserable.”