So Much for Those Early Retirement Plans
If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
Until recently, Jonathan Bernstein, a baby boomer and small-business owner in the Los Angeles area, had plans to “semi-retire.” On turning 60 in 2011, Bernstein had hoped to cut his workload in half, and he and his wife were contemplating purchasing a home in a state with a lower cost of living than California. But those plans have been scuttled now that the couple has seen values dwindle on both their home and Bernstein’s self-employed pension plan. Bernstein says his pension plan has dropped about 25 to 30 percent.
“In pretty much all ways, we’re belt-tightening just in case things get worse and also to eliminate the credit debt we’ve carried,” Bernstein says. “Despite all that, we’re very optimistic about a turnaround, perhaps still in time for us to pursue our previous plans - but we’re not counting on it.”
Ellen Naylor, 52, says she and her husband, 54, are also being squeezed by the recession. “Like many our portfolio took a beating this year since we did not see this coming,” she says. “We are pretty angry in a way since we have always been fiscally conservative and feel like we’re paying for others’ indulgences, not the least of which is the financial industry which lent people money who had no business ever assuming a mortgage.”
Naylor, who is based in Colorado, says they’re “belt-tightening like crazy” to cope, and that she and her husband are continuing to work, doing what they love - he is an artist, and she is writing a book on cooperative intelligence. “I have noticed that many who retire lose their minds and their spirit, so passionate working could well be a solution, and on lower speed as we get older,” she says.
Bernstein, Naylor and their spouses aren’t the only ones altering their retirement plans - but sources offer differing opinions as to why boomers and older Americans are doing so. Some say it’s due to the dismal economy, but others chalk it up to an innate drive to keep working, one that existed before the recession. (Baby boomers include approximately 78 million individuals born between 1946 and 1964.)
- Comments (0) on So Much for Those Early Retirement Plans
- Comment Feed for So Much for Those Early Retirement Plans
| Looking for a better job? |
|
Check out thousands of new jobs in the U.S. and more than 36 countries in our Career Center, powered by Monster.com. There’s no larger or more global job board in the blogosphere.
Editor’s Choice, Week of Jan. 5th, 2009 |
Everything’s Negotiable In Your Career
Terry Hird is a professional negotiator in Silicon Valley who enjoys teaching others the craft. Arranging a time to interview him by phone didn’t involve a lot of back and forth. It was a take it or leave it proposition.
Well, not really, I suppose I could have held out for an in-person meeting and then I would have been obliged to accept his location. That’s the thing about negotiations - you have to know when to press for what matters to you and be very selective about it. We agreed I would call him, but I’m no pushover.
A lack of good negotiation skills can hold back career advancement - and worse - says Hird who in addition to running his own firm also teaches an extension course at UC-Berkeley. “The most popular topics for [my students] are how to get a raise, and how to deal with a bad boss,” he says.
Do You Have the Stamina for Career Success?
In the book Executive Stamina: How to Optimize Time, Energy and Productivity to Achieve Peak Performance, authors Marty and Joshua Seldman make the case that by “optimizing your effectiveness,” you can enjoy a “long, balanced and successful career.”
The book might also be called Get Your Act Together, Dude!
Marty, the father, is an executive coach and clinical psychologist, skills that must come in handy in many boardrooms. His son, Joshua, is an endurance athlete, champion cyclist, and trainer. Together they offer practical insights about mind, body and career management that break little if any new ground yet usefully survey a lot of recent thinking in a wide range of areas - down to yoga in the office and stretching exercises.
Is Social Networking a Career Safety Net?
There are endless reasons to build a strong network of professional contacts. But perhaps none is more compelling in 2008 than the goal of establishing a career safety net.
In a recession jobs are last to get hit, yet are the slowest part of business spending to recover. This is the time to develop or revise an escape plan to insulate you from possible downturns or unforeseen changes at work.
“I don’t know if I would go so far as to call social networking a safety net,” says Kelly Krebs, Senior Account Executive at Horn Group, “but it can help if you if you are looking to move into a new career or if you are looking to expand your customer or partner base.”
Even though the economy is slumping that doesn’t mean you should stop expanding your web of contacts. While ultimately you will find & add contacts one at a time, the truth is you can better leverage your resources by joining social network-based communities.
Are You Happy With Your Work/Life Balance?
What’s the first thing that comes to mind when you hear the term work/life balance? Perhaps it’s the time you leave the office? Or maybe it’s the total number of hours you have worked in a week? Or is the time your colleagues leave the office compared to you?
Have you ever asked yourself whether you have achieved good work/life-balance? What criteria do you base your answers on?
Most people tend to connect work/life balance with time or hours spent at work. While that can be part of it, I would like to challenge your thinking on a deeper level. I believe it’s about the quality of how you spend your time, not just time itself. I ask myself: “How rewarded do I feel by what I did today?”
Maintaining balance is an ideal that permeates our lives in multiple ways. People go to chiropractors when they have a “misalignment” in their body and are looking to be “cracked” back into place. Generally, when one area is out of alignment it can have a ripple effect upon other parts of the body. The same thing happens in our lives. When one area is out of balance, it usually can, and most often does, have an effect (whether we realize it or not) on other areas in our lives.
Checking Out the Best Corporate Careers Sites
What do you look for in a good corporate careers site? Good jobs, certainly. A design that’s easy to navigate? Information about what it’s like to work at the company?
Most companies forget that last point or possibly they don’t know where to start.
Deutsche Bank delivered on all of the above when it created several Web-based videos of employees talking about why they work there.
And having checked it out, I can see why Deutsche Bank was proclaimed the best corporate careers site by a group of students, recent graduates and Swedish researchers.
Prospects Heating Up for Climate-Change Managers
Do you think of climate-change management as a legitimate career possibility?
Today, the money fueling climate-change management is found in scientific research and government sponsored grants. But corporations may consider hiring specialists to help them anticipate and mitigate the business impact of climate change.
Not only is climate-change management a relatively new course of study on campuses such as UC-Berkeley, it’s also a new career path, at least in the United Kingdom. A scan of several leading U.S. job boards shows a wide range of related environmental services jobs, drawn from diverse disciplines such as meteorology, geology and engineering.
Futurists, take note: Jobs that are today lumped into the environmental-services bucket may morph into something a bit more strategic.
