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Training to be Old

New York Times, 4/10/07

Abstract:

At 55, Frank Mendizabal has no immediate plan to leave his executive job at the Weyerhaeuser Company. And his finances are in good shape for when he does.

But he is haunted by a statistic he heard at a company retirement planning session last year: Women can expect to live 13 years longer than their mother or their maternal grandmother, and men can expect 11 more years than their father or paternal grandfather.

Mr. Mendizabal said he still intended to spend his first postretirement years shuttling between Canadian ski slopes and Spain. But Mr. Mendizabal, who enjoys running the occasional charity auction at Weyerhaeuser, is already checking into the market for part-time auctioneers...

...Geriatric specialists wish that more people has that attitude. Too often, they say, people equate retirement planning with 401(k)s and mutual funds. While financial planning is important, there are also psychological and physical implications to retirement preparation. With longer life expectancy, experts say, it has become even more important to train for those aspects of old age.

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