Training to Be Old

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. “I now realize that after a year or so of travel and being a ski bum, I better have something else to do,” he said. “So I’m going to sense the waters early, and build on a skill I have and enjoy.”

Geriatric specialists wish that more people had 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.

“We are getting to the point where people’s retirement life stage may be longer than their work life stage,” said Daniel J. Veto, senior vice president of Age Wave, a research group that focuses on aging.

So with the first wave of baby boomers already in their 60s, gerontologists are bracing for a tsunami of disgruntled postretirees who have left the psychic and physical aspects of aging to chance.

“We’re going to have a whole generation of people who are healthy, wealthy and bored,” said Dorothy Cantor, a co-author of “What Do You Want to Do When You Grow Up?”

Or perhaps not so healthy. Regarding the statistic that baby boomers are most likely to live well into their 80s and even beyond, Age Wave says that there is also a 40 percent chance that one half of a 65-year-old couple today will live to be 90. And barring drastic medical breakthroughs, these people will be coping with failing eyes and ears and stiffening joints — with many also suffering dementia and depression.

“While the medical community is good at fixing acute conditions like heart attacks,” Mr. Veto said, “it still doesn’t have the solutions to those chronic conditions that can rob you of satisfaction and joy in old age.” Surveys show that few people want to relocate when they are older, yet many must because their homes are not age-proofed — too many stairs, say, or no wheelchair access — or because they have not built up a social support structure for themselves.

“Because we are living longer, we have to adopt behaviors that will enable us to live independently to the end of those longer life spans,” said Dr. Gary J. Kennedy, who trains geriatric psychiatrists at the Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx.

Nor are baby boomers certain of how much time they will have to plan. Since Congress struck down mandatory retirement in 1986, many people have chosen to work into their 70s — only to find that when they do finally quit, their friends and, possibly, their spouses have died, their children live far away, and they have no idea how to fill their days. Conversely, corporate restructurings have forced many people into retirement long before they were prepared to write the next chapter of their lives.

“It used to be normative, you worked until 65 and then you retired,” said Adam Davey, an associate professor at Temple University who has studied retirement. “Well, these days, you just can’t expect that kind of seamless transition.”

A result, Dr. Kennedy said, is that “Depression already is a close second to dementia as a major problem for aging adults.”

In a sense, that is no surprise. People lose much more than a paycheck when they retire. They lose a community of like-minded souls, a sense of power and accomplishment and an important line of demarcation between workdays and weekends. They also lose a feeling of personal identity that is difficult to replace late in life.

Nancy K. Schlossberg, author of “Retire Smart, Retire Happy,” remembers meeting with a group of retirees from the World Bank. “What they missed most was the respect they got when they said where they worked,” she said. “When they retired, they lost their tag.”

For long-married couples, of course, the tag of Mr. or Mrs. can partly fill that gap. But, gerontologists say, couples face an even worse minefield if they do not plan retirement early on. They may discover that he wants to travel and she wants to stay home. He wants to spend, she wants to save. He wants to cocoon, she wants to socialize.

Those tugs of war are predicated on both parties remaining mobile and spry, something that cannot be taken for granted. It is less of an issue in cities like New York, where apartments with elevators and public transportation are the norm. But in much of the United States, aging populations are learning whole new ways to get around.

The Transit Authority of River City, which serves the metropolitan area of Louisville, Ky., has begun distributing videos that teach the basics of taking buses, from reading a schedule to how to signal a stop. It is taking a demonstration bus to local nursing homes, AARP chapter meetings and retirement homes, teaching people who have never taken buses before.

“Right now we’re concentrating on older people who can no longer drive, but we hope we’ll soon reach younger people before they have to give up their cars,” said Nina Walfoort, the authority’s director of marketing and planning.

Home can be a minefield, too. Stoves with knobs behind the burners, ovens and dishwashers that require high reaches or deep bends, sunken bathtubs — all may look cool when you’re 50, but can be daunting or even dangerous at 75. “The kitchen and bath of your dreams may be a nightmare when you’re old,” said Elinor Ginzler, director for livable communities at AARP.

That prospect already worries Stephen M. Wasserman, 62. He is planning to widen the bathroom door in his East Hampton weekend house so that a wheelchair can pass. He is also installing a shower chair and a higher toilet seat, and he may put in an elevator or chairlift to replace the steep stairs from his garage to the house. “I’m healthy as a horse now,” Mr. Wasserman, a part-time consultant in Manhattan, said, “but I may need these things when I’m older.”

He may also need good reasons to get up in the morning. Gerontologists say that boredom and a sense of uselessness are still the biggest problems of retirement — but, paradoxically, also the easiest to solve.

“We’re all trained to think of skills as things we develop for the workplace,” said John E. Nelson, a former pension consultant who now writes and teaches about nonfinancial aspects of retirement. “But think of them as strengths, and they open a huge number of opportunities.”

What’s crucial, Mr. Nelson and others say, is to sample opportunities before retirement D-Day. They suggest giving retirement a dry run, trying activities that seem appealing so that if they turn out not to be, there is time for rethinking.

Gail Koch, who owns the executive recruiting firm Comsearch, does not particularly like playing cards, and when her bulldog died two years ago, she took a hiatus from taking care of a pet. But Ms. Koch, who describes herself as “over 45” and nowhere near retirement, is taking bridge lessons and learning about different breeds of dogs.

“I want to be sure I’ll have companionship and a sense of community when I do retire,” Ms. Koch said. For now, she remains partial to bulldogs, and she is not sure she really likes bridge. “But if that doesn’t work out, I have time to learn poker,” she said.

That would be a relatively painless switch. But a change involving relocation, can be more fraught. Ms. Ginzler of AARP said she knew people who moved to golfing communities, and then discovered they missed city culture and really hated golf.

She heartily endorses what a close friend did: the woman, a Maryland resident in her 50s, bought a second home near a bus line in rural West Virginia. If they like the area as much as they suspect they will, they plan to sell the Maryland house when they retire, and spend their time in West Virginia.

People who started retirement planning late can use the Internet to get up to speed.

John Campbell, 79, retired almost two decades ago. But his wife, Amy, 57, continued working until two years ago, and then had to care for her sick father. So until recently, the couple were tethered to their four-story home in Great Neck, N.Y.

But last year, Mrs. Campbell’s father died, just about when her aching knees and her husband’s aging heart were giving them trouble on the stairs. “We looked at each other one day and said, ‘Why are we hanging around this congested metropolitan area when we could be some place beautiful, with fewer sharp elbows?’ ” Mr. Campbell said.

So they did a Google search for “best places to live,” narrowed it to a few cities and visited each. In December, they moved to a condominium in Asheville, N.C.

There is a hospital nearby, and a symphony and a theater. Mrs. Campbell has renewed a hobby, quilting, and is doing volunteer work. “It is the kind of place we can enjoy together now, and that Amy can happily stay in after I’m gone,” Mr. Campbell said.

Or as Mrs. Campbell put it: “I’m already making new friends. And, I expect there will always be a new bunch of younger retirees moving in.”