Retire? Absolutely. Stop working? No way.
Baby boomers are increasingly redefining retirement, by looking at it as a career change rather than an extended vacation plan, research suggests.
Whether it's a doctor closing his practice to work as a consultant to a hospital or a teacher taking an early retirement package and using it to start a small business, a growing pool of Canadians are opting to work after retirement.
The reasons are varied: Companies are still offering early retirement to high-cost employees in their 50s; pensions won't necessarily cover a person's desired lifestyle, and life expectancies have been steadily rising. Workers leaving a job in their 50s may have as many years of retirement as they had years of employment.
Add to that the fact that mandatory retirement is being challenged or dropped and that many people just aren't ready to down pencils and hit the gardening circuit.
"A lot of these people have accepted [buyout] packages but still want to work," says Marjorie Armstrong-Stassen, management professor emerita at the University of Windsor's Odette School of Business. "It could be they like to work and it provides structure and a role for them, it forms a part of their identity."
For the most part, she says, they are bridge employees, "people who have retired from their long-term career job and are now in a possibly a different type of job. Most of these jobs are going to be part-time, they're going to have flexible hours and schedules, that's often what these people are looking for."
A recent Merrill Lynch survey showed 76 per cent of boomers want to keep working and earning in retirement. Of those, 56 per cent expect to leave their current career and begin a whole new one.
As to how they plan to handle it, 42 per cent would prefer to alternate between periods of work and leisure, 16 per cent preferred part-time work, 13 per cent want to start their own business and a mere 6 per cent want to work full time. Only 17 per cent hope to never again work for a paycheque.
Boomer men seem to be looking forward to working less, relaxing more and spending more time with their spouses, suggested the survey, released in February. Meanwhile, women see the dual liberations of empty nesting and retirement as a chance for career development, community involvement and personal growth.
Not that they'll never retire. Most respondents in the on-line and telephone survey, which involved 2,348 Americans aged 40 to 58, said they will likely retire in the traditional sense at 70 or 75.
Similar trends have emerged in Canada and Britain, Ms. Armstrong-Stassen says.
Even so, the bridge employment group's size and behaviour is difficult to gauge, as they come from all walks of life, she adds. Even the age at which one considers bridge employment varies widely, she says.
For example, just days shy of his 66th birthday, Bill MacDonald looks a bit surprised when asked why he hasn't retired from his full-time job at a Home Depot in Toronto. As he sees it, retirement is nothing to rush into.
After a successful 46-year career, mostly as a manager of various enterprises, from a theatre to Irving Oil sales, to hardware stores, including 14 years at Home Depot, he recently decided to return to square one: an apron-wearing sales clerk. He sells washers and dryers, and other appliances.
"I was at the age where I'd done it all," he explains. "Working with customers, there's an amount of self-worth you get. When I go back to my car at night I say, 'I made these sales, and made friends with these customers, and maybe someone comes in to say their fridge works now.' I get total respect. There's no flack."
The next step, he says, is to go to a 22-hour-work week. By the time he retires fully, he hopes to have saved a six-figure nest egg, move out of his 17th floor Riverdale rental apartment, buy a condo and get a Labrador retriever.
