By P. Kelley of Knight Ridder Newspapers ©. This commentary appeared in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch © on June 25, 2000.

The idea of a life of leisure is being replaced by a search for meaning and fulfillment. Bill Carstarphen is one of those lucky people whose life’s work has been valuable and satisfying. As former city manager in several communities, including Greensboro, N.C., his career was sometimes high-pressure, but seldom dull.

Now at 60, as he looks to retirement, he aspires to a final stage of life that’s equally fulfilling.

“I want to find out what’s out there to make my life at this stage as stimulating as it can be,” says Carstarphen, of Charlotte, N.C.

During the past year, he’s been mulling ideas for his new path: Continue part-time consulting work for city governments, build a mountain home, travel. But he’s also seeking out advice at a seminar this month, exploring how to achieve a creative retirement.

As Americans live longer, experts stress the importance of this kind of social planning - planning how you’ll spend your retirement, not just how you’ll pay for it.

“We see people who are well-fixed, but they haven’t the faintest idea of what they’re going to do,” says Ron Manheimer, director of the North Carolina Center for Creative Retirement, based at the University of North Carolina, Asheville.

Denise Loftus, of the American Association of Retired Persons, says, “The reality is you can have all the money in the world, and if you don’t know what you’re going to do to make yourself happy, it’s not going to matter.”

A couple of generations ago, planning for a lengthy retirement wasn’t a pressing problem because chances were you wouldn’t live to see it. In 1900, the American life expectancy was 47. In 1940, it was less than 64.

Even if you reached retirement, poor health or exhaustion after a lifetime of hard, physical labor made it less likely that you longed to fill your days with activities.

Today, though, U.S. life expectancy at birth is nearly 77, and rising. People also stay healthy longer. Studies show that disabilities in people over 65 fell 15 percent from 1982 to 1994. If you’ve reached your 40s or 50s without any pressing health problems, financial advisers often counsel to plan as if you’ll live into your 90s.

That’s one good reason to put thought to retirement: It may last 20 or 30 years. Just as compelling is new research that emphasizes the importance of meaningful retirement to your mental and physical health.

In their book “Successful Aging” (Delacorte Press, $12.95 paperback), authors John Rowe and Robert Kahn argue that your mental and physical health as you age doesn’t primarily depend on whether you’ve got good genes, as many people assume.

Instead, it hinges more on individual choices in diet, exercise, the pursuit of mental challenges, close personal relationships and opportunities for productive activities.

When Loftus conducts retirement-planning workshops, she asks participants to list the benefits - besides pay - that they get from their jobs.

Often, people mention office friendships and the challenge or satisfaction they get from work.

So how will you replace those friendships and that challenge? she asks them.

“In your 50s is a good time to start thinking about this,” says Loftus, an employment and retirement specialist. “You’ve got to find out what excites you, what interests you.”

A few decades ago, the ideal retirement was often conceived as a time of leisure - a time for golf, bridge club and travel.

These days, gerontologists say the purely leisure retirement has been succeeded by a productive retirement model.

In a recent survey of Americans 50 to 75, only 28 percent agreed that retirement was “a time to take it easy, take care of yourself, enjoy leisure activities and take a much-deserved rest from work and daily responsibilities.”

“There’s a trend away from the ’keeping busy’ type of activities,” says retirement- and life-planning researcher and writer Carol Anderson, who lives in Washington state. “It used to be that ’keeping busy’ was the sign of a successful retiree. But now it’s not enough. People want meaning.”

More retirees are volunteering, or they’re using retirement to launch a second career or start a business. Many, like Carstarphen, continue to work part time in their fields.

“Volunteering is so important. I would say that everyone, if they have good health, should be involved in at least one or two volunteer groups that they can feel good about,” says Frances “Bookie” West, a retired teacher in Charlotte, N.C., whose volunteer activities include work in her church. “That helps your mind to say that you’re contributing in the community.”

Since Marilyn Persons retired from nursing, she’s remained active with clubs, exercise and church groups.

But now she’s making plans to do part-time work. She thinks the work will add meaning to her life. She looks forward to being paid again, too.

“You cannot be active all your life and then at 65 there’s a fence that comes down that says from now on, you’re not allowed to work,” Persons says.

Retirement’s a great time to rekindle interests you’ve put aside during your working years, Manheimer says.

At 65, for instance, Jean Feiler rediscovered ice skating, even though she hadn’t stepped on the ice since she was a girl. Now 69, she squeezes skating into a packed schedule of political and church activities.

The ice “is a place where I don’t deal with issues or people,” she says.

Relationships change, too.

Retirement also forces couples to make major adjustments in relationships. “It’s one of the major transition times I find in terms of tensions among couples,” says Marc West, a marriage and family therapist in Charlotte and husband of Bookie West. With both partners spending more time at home, “privacy needs get bumped into.”

Jean and Joe Feiler anticipated that problem. When they retired to Charlotte, the couple bought a two-story town house “so we can have our own space,” Jean says.

Phyllis Smith and her husband, Mial, also went through a transition when he retired 11 years ago.

For years, Phyllis had been boss on the home front. Now, her husband wanted to rearrange the refrigerator. Fine, Phyllis told him, as long as you also take over the cooking. “He backed off,” she says.

Over time, they adjusted. “It may have taken about a year for us to settle into our roles where there were certain things that I didn’t stick my nose in and he learned to stay his distance on things,” she says.

Like the Smiths, most people feel their way through the transitions of retirement on their own. But more are seeking advice from experts.

In recent years, the North Carolina Center for Creative Retirement has held an annual retirement exploration weekend for people considering retiring to the North Carolina mountains.

This year, responding to requests, the center has added a day to the conference to explore general retirement issues, including redefining relationships, recreating yourself and finding spirituality and meaning.

Manheimer sees the growing interest in these topics as “an indicator of major changes in the society, about taking on retirement as a life course challenge.”

The group formerly known as the International Society for Retirement Planning also acknowledged those changes when it changed its name in January to the International Society for Retirement and Life Planning.

And more financial planners are including life-planning issues in their retirement discussions with clients, Anderson says.

Expect more life planning as baby boomers near retirement in the next decade, experts say.

Expect the image of retirement that Carstarphen recalls from his childhood - the image of “old people sitting around” - to vanish.

And expect more people like Jean Feiler, who’s so involved in church activities, political causes and other volunteer work that she pencils in Friday mornings as the one morning of the week when she’s home.

“Life goes on,” she says, “and it’s exciting.”

###

Return to Estate Planning

Return to Volunteer Opportunities