Alternatives To Retirement For Boomers

Over the last few years many of the baby Boomer generation have been looking for alternatives to retirement. They are moving away from the traditional idea of retirement for lots of good reasons. Slaving away for 40 years building a nest egg to fund a gradual, leisurely decline towards death just doesn’t hold much appeal.

We are in general living healthier and longer lives. We don’t necessarily want to retire completely but want to do something else – maybe even well past the standard retirement age. Lets also consider the Elephant in the room: The fact we are all living longer means we have to fund a longer retirement

“In short, achieving financial security following the old-school retirement planning model requires more savings than most people can accumulate, to fund a lifestyle most people don’t really want. It’s a serious problem”

financialmentor.com

Those are two reasons why in recent years this generation have been actively pursuing alternatives to retirement. Either they have to or they want to.

The Traditional Plan – Birth, School, Career, Death

Apologies for the grim truth but lets be honest – thats what we’ve been sold for a very long time. Its still true that as you get older you want to slow down a bit. You want to spend more time doing things that fulfil rather than simply fund a reduced lifestyle. Key to this of course is financial independence and in this day and age it’s never been more attainable.

What many baby boomers nearing or at retirement age want can be summarised in two main areas:

Life made easy

Time saved

In other words they are looking for time, convenience, freedom or ease. Not 30 or possibly even 40 years of doing nothing of any real substance. So what alternatives to retirement exist for the vast numbers of baby boomers who will reach that time of life over the next 20 years?

For some it might be a part time job or consultancy work in the field they built careers in. For others it’s starting a business. Not many people in the 50 -65 age range would really want to build a traditional business. That would hardly meet the criteria above would it? Add to that the fact that retirement is about escaping from what you’ve been doing for most of your life.

The membership of the business community I’m part of – The SFM – caters to a large number of baby boomers. They come from all walks of life and working backgrounds. What they have in common is the realisation that the Internet offers everything they are looking for.

Alternatives To Retirement – The Lifestyle Business

The Internet has opened up an unprecedented range of opportunity for people of all ages. To the Boomer generation however it offers the opportunity to be a person of value in a burgeoning new economy that simply wasn’t around for them back in the day. They (we) may not yet take the web and all the tech that’s grown up around it for granted, but we have watched it steadily change the world.

As an alternative to retirement, mastering the skills to leverage the digital economy ticks all the boxes. An online business can be built around virtually anything, can be run from anywhere and takes a fraction of the time a traditional business or job does. So some of the traditional retirement dreams can be realized: Re-location, travel, the golf course, round the world trip, while still generating a potentially very nice income for as long as you want or need it.

If you’re looking for alternatives to retirement and like the sound of building a lifestyle business you’ll love this free video series. Click on the link below to meet the SFM founders and community.