Analyzing Retirement Facts: Retire? But I’m Not Dead Yet!

When I was growing up, my mom absolutely loved the movie Monty Python and the Holy Grail. There is this great scene where a group of workers are walking through a medieval town and yelling, “Bring out your dead!  Bring out your dead!”  As a worker is throwing a guy onto the cart the he says, “But I’m not dead yet!” and the worker says something like, “Shut up!  You will be soon.” 

I was reminded of this scene as I was thinking about mid career professionals who have chosen to retire or have been retired. They’re “not dead yet!” I think there’s a huge brain drain out there of mid career folks that in times of recession will leave the workforce either by choice, because they chose to retire, or someone chose to lay them off. Suddenly, 30-35 years of experience is gone. That experience just doesn’t exist in the market place as it used to. So what do people do when they retire at a fairly early age?

To dig a little deeper, I did some research on the latest retirement facts. I think most people would agree that we learn a lot of things when we are kids that stick with us forever. I was born in 1959, and in my mind and experience I started to believe, at a very young age, that when you become an adult, you get a job, you retire and then you die. I began to wonder why that thought was so prevalent. My next step was to pull out some numbers. In the late 1960s, I would have been 10 years old. The life expectancy of a man in 1960 was only 66.8 years. From then on through the 90s, the average age of retirement was 66. By the 70s, a male’s lifespan was 67.7 years. In other words, if you retired when you were 66 you literally did retire and then die. 

Fast-forward to 2010 (the most recent data available), and this is no longer the case. The average age of retirement now is 62. The average life expectancy for men is 75 and for women it’s 80. The average life expectancy across the board, male or female, is 77. So, if you retire at 62 you still have 15 years. Also, on top of that, the median age for retirement is 57. This means that half of the people retire older than 57 and half retire 57 or younger. So now do the math. If you retire at 57 and the average lifespan is 77, that’s 20 years of retirement. 

I think a lot of us need to lose the mindset that you get a job, work until it’s time to retire and then you die. Like the Monty Python movie, “I’m not dead yet!” There’s so many people out there that still have 20, 30 and even 40 years of life left, and still 20 to 30 years of being able to leverage their experience into the marketplace.

Truth be told, I’ve probably been fascinated by this because I am now 53. I’m going to be faced with this decision in the next five or ten years. I’m curious to know how people who have chosen to exit the full-time corporate world spend their time. How do they leverage their experience? How do they contribute? 

There is a great personal development book called Half Time that is specifically targeted towards men. The premise is that men spend the first half of their life seeking success and the second half seeking significance. This got me to thinking about people who have chosen to retire or to do something else or to move from corporate to entrepreneurial. I like the idea of spending the first half of your life chasing success and developing your career and resume, then spending the second half of your life leveraging the first half’s lessons, allowing those lessons learned to have a strong impact on the remainder of your career and really drive some significance. 

I find this all to be very important, and given the current economic situation, there are literally millions of people out there that have 10, 20 or 30 years of experience to contribute. They should do something meaningful and take the success they had in the first halves of their careers and leverage it out into great significance. Many mid career professionals are finding that significance by leveraging their "knowledge capital" across SEVERAL companies instead of looking for one single employer. They are finding the work rewarding, and they are helping folks all while achieving financial success -- a true win/win/win.

So, after "half time," people are finding out that it is possible to achieve success AND significance by leveraging the lessons learned during the first half!

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