Peter Dunn: We need to rethink retirement as a new challenge

I haven’t been to a retirement party in nearly a decade. And no, it’s not because I’m known to kill the vibe at any social occasion with my unsolicited dissertations on the day’s traffic inconveniences.

Instead, I get the sense that retirement, as a concept itself, is suffering from an identity crisis. Whereas the cake party and gold watch used to represent a career achievement, it’s now shrouded in uncertainty and even the shame of agedness. And honestly, I don’t love that.

Successfully retiring is the most difficult financial task all of us aim to complete. It requires planning, discipline, a little bit of luck and more dogged determination than most people might expect. While we’re aggressively paying attention to the quantitative factors of retirement, we can suffer cruel health and longevity problems. Only a near-perfect retirement plan, chock full o’guaranteed lifetime income, can mitigate the challenges of extending your years beyond current life expectancy.

This is why people are tiptoeing into retirement now, instead of busting through the retirement wall like the glee- (and sugar-) filled Kool-Aid Man.

There are several reasons retirements aren’t celebrated like they used to be. Some of those reasons can be overcome, while others feel permanent. Let’s start with pensions, because careers used to end with pensions—and now we’ve reached the end of pensions.

For the last five years, we’ve all been forced to become buddies with the term “uncertain times.” In fact, at times it feels like the only certainty in life is uncertainty. It wasn’t always this way. A pension was the magical key to certainty. Put in 30-ish years of loyal work, and you got 30-ish years of a well-funded retirement in return. I’ve been tangentially involved in the world of pensions for a quarter century, and the entire concept still blows my mind. For the most part, pensions are now a relic of the past, like the domestic manufacturing that allowed them to exist.

When pensions effectively died, certainty died with them. Second-guessing and over-indexing on luck were then the result. It’s really sad. I don’t mean that in a haughty, passive-aggressive sense. I mean the roadblocks seem to outnumber the open roads. That’s disheartening.

People are afraid to retire. They’re afraid to declare to the world—and more important, to themselves—that they’ve got a sustainable multi-decade plan to survive. Sheesh. Putting it like that makes me a bit nervous. But darn it, let’s get back to that. Let’s call our shot. Let’s put it on the line like we used to. Yeah, a lot has changed. Dare I say everything has changed. The wishy-washy nature of retirement today isn’t healthy. It’s not bold. It’s sad.

Culturally, we’ve got to change this. As stupid as this sounds, the uncertainty is unsustainable.

We need people to view retirement like the challenge it is and run toward it, not away from it. There are all sorts of reasons people don’t make the jump. They’re scared. They aren’t up for the challenge of a lifetime, which comes with pressure and accountability. And in a way, no one is leading the way. The retirement party is such an obscure concept that it’s not inspiring or even informative. The whole thing is broken.

In moments like these, we all look for someone to swoop in and save the day. But I have great news: That ain’t happening. You must reframe your relationship with financial reality. Not having a retirement plan is resignation. Creating a plan and executing on it is ownership. A retirement party is not the origin story of your newfound irrelevance; it’s an iconic moment celebrating the most difficult moment in your financial life. You have to embrace that. We all do.

I understand the other side of this. I understand how difficult it is to grasp the sting of mortality and a lost sense of purpose. But you either codify the ills of those realities by not going for it, or you can stare them straight in the face and control your own destiny.

Set a date for your party. Just be sure to do it on a light traffic day, and then maybe I’ll attend.•

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Dunn is CEO of Your Money Line powered by Pete the Planner, an employee-benefit organization focused on solving employees’ financial challenges. Email your financial questions to [email protected].