A Los Angeles Business Journal poll last week asked at what age people planned to retire (or already retired). The biggest number of respondents – 35 percent – said “never,” and 28 percent plan on retiring well after age 65.
Granted, this is a decidedly unscientific poll, but still, a total of 63 percent are planning to blow well past the age of 65 before they hang it up, if they do so at all. That’s pretty amazing. (What prompted the poll question, by the way, was a recent special report in the Business Journal, “Eight Over 80,” which profiled eight Angelenos, all 80 or older, who are not just still in the game of business but still throwing heat.)
I bring this up because of a pet peeve of mine: all those consultants out there striving to persuade business owners that they have a big problem on the horizon because of the tsunami of retirements of baby boomers.
That looming problem will be the same dud as the Y2K bug. I’m a baby boomer and I know not one of my peers who’s planning to retire. And especially now that all those 401(k) plans have been whittled down to 101 (k)s, I’ll bet even more retirements has been postponed.
The simple fact is that these days many people don’t feel old enough to retire at 65. (It also is worth noting that the kind of people most likely to respond to the Business Journal’s poll – executives, managers, professional people – are the very people that companies want to keep from retirement.)
Companies’ problem will not be finding ways to keep baby boomers from retiring. It’ll be finding ways to prod them out the door.