The New Age of Retirement

Today’s retirees want more exciting schedules than days spent on the beach or on a golf course. Instead, they are embracing new lifestyles, career opportunities and financial strategies to stay active, connected and happy.

By Colleen Ann McNally

A new chapter of life is in bloom for Johns Creek resident Amy Rider. After beginning her career as a physical therapist, starting a foster care and adoption ministry, and raising children of her own, Rider is embarking on an entrepreneurial adventure at the ripe age of 56: Blossom & Vine, a European-inspired floral and gift shop.

“Last year, I took a floral design class and thought, ‘I could do this everyday. Maybe this is the direction I should go,’” says Rider, who always wanted to lead her own business in the hospitality sector. She considered opening a bakery or bed-and-breakfast before finding her fit in florals. “I started dreaming, talked to my husband and made a business plan. We just kept stepping, stepping, stepping and look at us now — we have a little flower shop!”

The debut of her business comes at a time when previous generations were ending theirs. However, Rider didn’t feel that retirement was right for her. She would rather stay busy. “This might sound kind of crazy, but I actually wanted to do something hard,” she says of her motivation behind her business. “I thought it’s going to be good for me if I learn new things, learn new technologies.”

Her search for inspiration and education took her as far as New York and Paris, France to study under other florists, including world-renowned designer Catherine Mullin. Now, Rider is sharing those lessons with others through workshops in her studio, and is most looking forward to cultivating relationships with her staff and her customers. She hopes to create a beautiful space where her neighbors can learn something new, find inspiration or brighten someone’s day.

There is a rising wave of would-be retirees, like Rider, who are opting for encore careers that provide personal meaning and a positive social impact instead of relaxing into retirement. According to a recent survey by CNBC, only 11% of people at retirement-age say they don’t plan to work in any capacity after they retire, while 53% anticipate working, whether because they’ll want to or to supplement their income.

This seismic shift comes at a time when a record number of Americans — an estimated 4.1 million people — celebrated their 65th birthday in 2024. And thanks to modern healthcare and increased life expectancy, these not-so-seniors are giving new meaning to “golden years” by embracing new lifestyles, career opportunities and financial strategies to stay active, connected and happy.

Entering the Encore

Jack Calhoun founded the Atlanta-based Encore Career Lab to help successful professionals in their 50s and 60s make this transition. He designed his services based on his own personal experience of redefining himself after selling the wealth management firm he had led for nearly 20 years.

“I was ready to do something different. I thought it would be fun to reinvent myself and do something totally new,” Calhoun says. But in reality, he found the change a lot harder than he expected. “I really underestimated how much of my identity was wrapped up in my career.” Now he knows how common it is for people who are deeply invested in their work to feel a strong level of enmeshment between their personal and professional lives. “When people had a great career and they don’t have it anymore, they get anxious about how to answer the question, ‘What do you do?’” he says.

From his personal experience, Calhoun also knows that finding a new answer to that question can be overwhelming and even paralyzing. “When you can do anything, how do you decide what anything is? There’s a paradox of choice,” he says. “When you have so many different directions you can go, it becomes paralyzing because when you pick one, you’re saying no to everything else.”

Calhoun explored passion projects like creative writing and even created a consumer product—a Wifi-enabled meat thermometer—before launching Encore Career Lab. “After all that, I realized that I wish I had a process or a program I could have gone through when I sold my company that would have helped me prepare for this next phase of life,” he says. So, he reversed-engineered his experience into a 12-week program to help fellow high-achievers reinvent themselves.

The program, which includes watching pre-recorded lessons, participating in a group cohort and meeting one-on-one with Calhoun, focuses on finding a personal purpose. “It’s good to be part of this group experience,” he says. As we age, some people may turn inward and not want other people to know they are struggling, however, he points out that it’s important to realize that it’s not just you; it’s this phase in life.

Finding Your Why

Drawing from the work of the happiness experts like Arthur C. Brooks and Simon Sinek, Calhoun says that before people can answer “what” they’re doing, they have to answer the “why” behind it, or they can find themselves pursuing wrong paths.

“There is a cultural awakening from the conventional view of retirement as we’ve known it for the last century is really outdated, and even a little bit unhealthy,” he explains, adding that the concept of retirement as a distinct stage of life in America can be traced back to the Social Security Act of 1935, which established age 65 as the benchmark for employees to leave the workforce in exchange for pension benefits. At the time, average life expectancy rates hovered between 55-65 years old, depending on gender and ethnicity. Then, as 20th-century innovations led to longer, healthier lives, people found themselves with longer retirements.

“I think people are realizing that is too long of a period of time and it’s only going to keep getting longer with better medical care and people taking better care of themselves,” Calhoun says. “You could be looking at having as many years post-career as you did during your career.” Through Encore Career Lab, he hopes to help his peers fill this void with something potentially more rewarding than golf and crochet (not saying these can’t be), while still staving off potential risks of depression and dementia that have been linked to a sedentary lifestyle.

“People are realizing they have an entire third act of their lives, while they don’t want to keep grinding like they did in a corporate career, they still want to do things that are meaningful, make us feel like we are important and has that get-out-of-bed quality to it in the morning,” says Calhoun.

Flexing Your Finances

While living life on one’s own terms may be priceless, it still comes at a cost. When planning for the future, having a strategy that is economically sound is equally as important as one that fills the soul.

Just ask Allison Baines, a certified financial planner (CFP) and wealth plan design manager at oXYGen Financial. In the past decade, she has witnessed first-hand the shift in how her clients are investing in their futures. “People used to work at the same place for a long time and then just ride off into the sunset,” Baines says. Now, she says many of her clients aged 50 and better are opting to take a step back, slow down and reorganize their priorities, but are not necessarily giving up the grind altogether. “Those who have saved well have more financial freedom,” she adds. Maybe they take a year or two to relax and then pick up consulting part-time, for example. Or, they could end up going into a different corporate career in a different capacity. “They can take their foot off the gas a little bit … But we see people not necessarily wanting to retire in the true sense of the word at 55 or 60 anymore.”

Another significant shift among retirement-age clients is their portfolio structure, Baines adds. For previous generations, retirees would utilize a classic 60/40 stock-bond investment strategy, with the corporate bonds paying a certain yield every month. As interest rates have changed, however, that landscape has evolved. “Rather than you being in these lower-risk securities, we are having to make sure that you’re in [more] stocks, because if you’re not in positions that are going to grow, then your portfolio is at risk of running out of money,” she explains. “We’re seeing people staying invested in the markets for longer, which is helping them to beat inflation and also to keep their portfolio growing.”

Working with wealth planners like Baines is also critical to stay up-to-date on any new rulings from the IRS, such as the Secure Act of 2020. This put a 10-year time limit on distributions for any non-spouse beneficiary of an inherited individual retirement account (IRA). Imagine that you’re 50 years old and inherited a parent’s IRA account after 2020, so you now have to liquidate that entire account within a decade—meaning you have to take out at least $25,000, and that income is taxable to you. “That’s a big, big change, just as people are getting into retirement and starting to get comfortable in the later years of their life,” Baines says. She guides her clients through considering all their options, whether that means taking larger distributions earlier, converting money to a different type of retirement account, or gifting the money.

Loving Where You Live

Along with reevaluating how to spend their time and money, active adults are also reevaluating where they live. While data from Merill Lynch shows that 64% of seniors plan to stay in their homes and age in place, approximately 51% percent of retirees ages 50 and over will downsize into smaller homes.

Forward-thinking real estate developers and property management companies are evolving their portfolio of multi-family apartment homes to better meet the needs of this emerging demographic. For example, Eben Silver Town is a new senior living community in Suwanee inspired by Korean culture. Another example is Greystar’s Overture brand, with Atlanta area communities located in Buckhead, Barrett Parkway and Powers Ferry, offers contemporary luxury in its interior design and amenities specifically for residents who are 55 and up. Meanwhile, their Everleigh brand puts extra emphasis on wellness with locations at Halcyon in Forsyth County, downtown Duluth and Deerfield near the Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta airport.

Maritza Garcia, the director of real estate for Greystar’s Active Adult segment, joined the company in 2016 and now leads the Overture teams across the country. During this time, Greystar has continually worked to improve the design of their communities, from finding the sweet spot in the size of the shared entertaining spaces—the most popular amenity—and also through surveys with residents to better understand what types of programming they want, whether it’s a garden club, wellness classes, volunteering efforts or happy hour.

Another trend gaining popularity among retirees is joining intentional communities like Lake Claire Cohousing, where resources, chores and lives are shared in a cooperative environment. For those seeking a more pastoral setting, Serenbe, located just south of Atlanta, offers a wellness-focused community with preserved forests, walkable neighborhoods and a 25-acre organic farm that supplies fresh produce to local restaurants. These intentional communities provide an alternative for those seeking deeper connections, shared purpose and a lifestyle that blends independence with collaboration.

Still, not everyone is looking to socialize. “They may not love the lifestyle piece, but they love the idea of the lock-and-leave lifestyle,” says Priscilla Mullen, Greystar’s senior manager for regional sales in active adult. For those who want to travel, the low- to no-maintenance aspect of an apartment allows them to come and go carefree.Considering each person’s purpose will be unique and personal to them, one thing is clear: the new age of retirement is anything but boring.

Back at Blossom & Vine, Rider is focused on paying forward the lessons she learned from Catherine Mullin in Paris. “The thing that struck me most about my time with her is the fun she and her team had doing the work that they did,” Rider says. “Yes, they create beautiful flowers and yes they are very talented. but the most important thing is how much laughter and joy was in their group. I really want to duplicate that.”