If 65 is the New 50, How Will Baby Boomers Remake Retirement?
Photo by Eileen Kennedy
Philadelphia attorney Robert Heim quickly scanned the list of partners eligible for election to his law firm’s policy committee, hunting for his name. He enjoyed this familiar ritual. Like so many other validations, the list confirmed his leadership at a firm where he made partner three decades ago. He took pride in having won election every year in which he was eligible. But this year would be different. There it was in black and white: ineligible.
At age 64, he could no longer complete a two-year term because committee members had to be younger than 65. He had supported the age cutoff every time the issue had come up. Now that it applied to him, the policy stung.
“It was the first time in my life that I was ever too old for something,” he recalls. “It made me start to think, ‘I’m in the traditional retirement zone without having spent even one day thinking about it.’ ”
That unsettling moment nearly three years ago set the silver-haired litigator on a path familiar to hundreds of thousands of baby boomers nearing retirement. For him and others, the notion of being too old is unexplored territory. Who was he if he was no longer a litigator at the peak of his game? He didn’t feel old. Yet he began to wonder whether it was high time he considered moving on, if there were other things he wanted to do with his life than practice law.
“Should I be thinking of this?” he asked his wife, Eileen Kennedy, when he got home that evening. “Should we be thinking of this?”
The answer is an emphatic yes. More than one-quarter million lawyers are 55 years or older, according to American Bar Foundation statistics. And, ready or not, they are approaching one of the biggest transitions of their lives.
Common wisdom held that after marching through their formative decades to a different drummer, boomers would approach retirement differently. Rather than slowing down or settling into a life of leisure, they would step with renewed energy into new pursuits. Many would launch sequel careers.
Then along came the worst recession of their lifetimes and, with it, increased financial insecurity. Reinvention is no longer merely desirable. For many, “it’s an imperative,” says Mark Miller, author of the nationally syndicated column “Retire Smart” and an upcoming book, The Hard Times Guide to Retirement Security.
After focusing, heads down, on building careers and raising families, they are looking up, startled to find there is no road map for what lies ahead. They are facing limits, tempering ambition, reaching back to youthful ideals and values while moving toward a new stage.
Continue reading “Not Done Yet” online in the April ABA Journal.
