The Retirement Bubble

“Martin Amis and Christopher Buckley are writers who are entering their silver years and are worried about the costs of an ageing population. Mr Amis, who has a new novel out, recently compared the growing army of the elderly to ‘an invasion of terrible immigrants, stinking out the restaurants and cafés and shops’. Mr Buckley devoted a novel, ‘Boomsday’, to the impending war of the generations. They have both touted the benefits of mass euthanasia, though Mr Amis favours giving volunteers ‘a martini and a medal’ whereas Mr Buckley supports more sophisticated incentives such as tax breaks.

“Novelists will have their jokes. But Messrs Amis and Buckley are right to warn about the threat of the ’silver tsunami’. Most people understand about the ageing of society in the abstract. But few have grasped either the size of the tsunami or the extent of its consequences. This is particularly true of the corporate world.”

I consider the collapse of the Retirement Bubble to be pretty obvious and all but unavoidable at this stage. This has many consequences for our societies, far beyond social security and medical payments for older people. One of the consequences will be the need for business to reconsider its attitude toward older workers. The words above are taken from the opening lines of an article at Britain’s Economist. It discusses how businesses are finally coming to grips with demographic reality and what they are thinking of doing.

I have been patiently waiting for this. With a declining “working age” population (as traditionally defined), the US and many other nations will have problems finding enough workers to keep their national economies functioning, competitive, and growing. Now that they are slowly realizing this, they are experimenting with various approaches, some of them mentioned at the Economist.

What does this mean to you? It emphasizes both the necessity to keep at least “one foot in” the work world and the potential benefits of doing so. As the implications for the future become clearer to businesses across the North Atlantic, efforts such as those described at the Economist will increase in number and in sophistication. But older people looking for jobs are not going to be hired indiscriminately. Those who get the good jobs, certainly those who get the best-paid jobs, are going to be those who have something other than years of “nothing” at the top of their resumes.

For those considering traditional retirement, the Life Sabbatical approach can help you get you where you need to be. For those already retired, now is the best time to start replacing “nothing” with something on that resume and the Life Sabbatical approach can help you too.

When a trend begins that will have great impact in the future, it begins as this one is beginning, with an article here and an article there. Over the last couple decades, these trends have tended to be negative, often very negative. Here is a positive trend that can benefit you one day when you need it.

If you can see the logic behind the Retirement Bubble, you should have no trouble seeing the logic behind this trend. As the collapse of the Retirement Bubble becomes ever more obvious, so will this trend.

But in the real world of work, you have a responsibility too. Nothing will be handed out to anyone just because they are old. You will be able to take great advantage of this trend in the future, but only if you prepare for it now.
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