Nevada Retirement Planners

Beyond Work is the title of a recently published book by executive coach and business psychologist Bill Roiter [pictured to the left].  It’s another book about the retirement of the baby boom generation – I reckon they arrive through my transom at the rate of one a month. Nothing wrong with that: some I skim, some I read.

This one I skimmed. The subtitle is “How accomplished people retire successfully.” In that respect, it covers roughly similar ground as Sherry Cooper’s The New Retirement, which we reviewed here earlier this year.

While based in Boston, Roiter is writing for a North American audience. When he writes about Social Security, he also mentions the Canada Pension Plan; or when he talks about IRAs he mentions the RRSP in the same breath.

He begins with a survey about how accomplished people retire – not surprisingly, having been accomplished in their working years, accomplished retirees also ace retirement. They never really stop working, they just shift gears. Roiter uses a composite derived from multiple interviews of real retirees to paint a picture of the typical accomplished retiree as well as those that don’t do a good job of retiring. The latter typically were totally focused on work, never developed outside interests, then feel bereft when their old colleagues still in harness don’t wish to hear from them too often. 

In my interview with Moses Znaimer earlier this week, he mentioned some statistics worth citing here; only 7% of retirees engage in a classic full-stop retirement; 50% keep working because they need the money and 40% work part-time as a way to stay connected and to supplement their retirement income.

Roiter includes an interesting chart on page 23 which provides generational profiles of the baby boomers’ parents (65 to 85 as of 2007); the Baby Boomers today (43 to 61 as of 2007); and Baby Boomers in 2030 (when they will be 66 to 84, or the age our parents are today if they’re still living).

The chart contrasts the 2030 boomers with our parents. The future boomers will be more active, more dedicated to continuous learning, focused more on self-improvement than family and will spend more on out-of-pocket health care costs.

Roiter also summarizes the work of authors like Gail Sheehy (Passages) and Daniel Levinson (Seasons of a Man’s Life), then synthesizes their insights into his own “Beyond Work” categorization of the three eras of adulthood.  They are:

1.)    First Era: Definition and Growth (20 to 40 years)

2.)    Second Era: Consolidation and Fulfillment (40 to 60 years)

3.)    Third Era: Knowledge and Reward (60+ years).

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The Rockefeller Foundation has begun to focus on globalization’s effects closer to home, specifically on the way it has increased economic insecurity for many American workers.


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The not-quite retired quarterback formally applied for reinstatement to the N.F.L. on Tuesday, the first step in a process that could have him back in uniform later this week.


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The misery for investors doesn’t stem just from the recent sell-off, which pushed stocks into an official bear market. The problem is deeper than that.


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After 26 years with Bank of America, I decided to retire. I told my wife, an executive recruiter, that I was going to return to India and play golf. She said, “We’ll see.” Six months later, she found me a job to get me out of her hair.


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In their new book, Alicia H. Munnell and Steven A. Sass argue that we may have to work longer and retire later if we want to avoid a decline in our standard of living.


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If we boomers decide to use our retirement to change the world, rather than our golf game, our dodderdom will have consequences for society as profound as our youth did.


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Senator Joseph L. Bruno is likely to get a significant raise from New York State by retiring.


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Today's subject title is from this essay published in The Nation. The writer, Nicholas von Hoffman,  bills himself as a "Pulitzer Prize losing author" of 13 books. [Note the word "losing"!]

Hoffman's gloomy essay makes some telling points. He notes that everyone is suffering from the current economic malaise, even those who didn't speculate on their homes or buy a home they couldn't afford. But because of the excesses of their neighbours that did  and "the criminal folly of American finance" their retirement dreams nevertheless are being destroyed. 

One of the big arguments the financial industry has made in encouraging people to invest for retirement is that America's Social Security system may not be there for them when it's the boomers' turn to retire. The situation was nicely summarized by Scott Burns and Lawrence Kotlikoff in the 2004 book, The Coming Generational Storm. The fact that the Canada Pension Plan is on a somewhat sounder footing is another topic, since Burns and Kotlikoff, as well as Hoffman, are far more concerned about the situation in the States.

The irony, as Hoffman notes, is that the way things have been unfolding lately, "the bright spot is Social Security." Unfortunately it's "private savings that may not be there. They are discovering they have been forced into a system in which other people have, in effect, been allowed to gamble with their retirement savings and have lost it."

Hoffman says Social Security cheques will be there whether stocks are up or down and the benefits are indexed to inflation to boot. However, it is "too narrow a ledge to stand on through the years between retirement and death." It was only meant to be a base to complement  employer pensions and private savings.  But instead, America's tax-sheltered savings  have been vaporizing along with the value of their homes. Meanwhile the "Wall Street fee farmers" get rich no matter what happens to their clients' retirement plans.

In short, not a fun read. One hopes essays like this turn out to be the kind of gloomy consensus that characterizes market bottoms. As we noted in this piece last week, the fund manager of the late Sir John Templeton's Templeton Growth Fund felt the news couldn't get worse and therefore investors should invoke Templeton's famous maxim that the best time to buy stocks is at the point of maximum pessimism. Note too that part 2 of the video interview with Lisa Myers is now up and available here. The focus of the second segment is on why there are no Canadian stocks in the Templeton Growth Fund currently.

If indeed the news does get worse, then all bets are off. If that's the case, for many the only solution will be to delay retirement and keep working as long as possible.  

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The province of Quebec continues to be on the forefront of Phased Retirement — a way of allowing aging employees to draw partial benefits from employer-sponsored pension plans while still accruing pension benefits for their later full Retirement. The idea is to gradually cut down your hours — to perhaps a four-day week, then three-days — rather than abruptly go from a five-day a week regime to a "full-stop" zero days a week classical retirement.

According to Watson Wyatt Canada — which just issued the following flash advisory — Quebec's Bill 68 received assent on June 20th and it "contains some surprises."  Bill 68 is an act that amends the Supplemental Pension Plans Act and the Quebec Pension Plan (Quebec's equivalent of the Canada Pension Plan). Most of the changes will be more of interest to pension industry practitioners than the members of pension plans, although there may be implications for near-retirees. They concern multi-employer plans, letters of credit and other fine points, not all of them directly applicable to Phased Retirement per se.

The biggest amendment I could see is that payment of a Phased Retirement pension to members of Defined Contribution plans is now stated to begin as early as age 55. The maximum annual benefit payable to a DC plan member cannot exceed 60% of the ceiling on the life income the member could receive under a life income fund.

In mid December of 2007, the federal government gave Royal Assent to legislation implementing changes to the Phased Retirement rules that were announced in the 2007 federal budget and economic statement. This legislation was a major step towards introducing Phased Retirement across Canada, although provincial action is still required to allow non federally-regulated employers to take advantage of it.

A survey of senior business leaders conducted by Watson Wyatt and the Conference Board of Canada found more than half of chief financial officers and Human Resource department vice presidents were "very concerned" about attracting and retaining highly skilled high performing employees that are approaching Retirement. A third of the respondents indicated they had implemented or planned to implement Phased Retirement.

Currently, the only provinces that permit phased retirement are Alberta and Quebec. Manitoba has introduced some legislative amendments that have yet to be brought into force. For federally regulated employees, the federal government has taken steps to eliminate obstacles in pension standards to the Phased Retirement provisions of the Income Tax Act.

For more see this backgrounder, entitled A Closer Look at Phased Retirement.  

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