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By Mark Venning, ChangeRangers.com
Special to the Financial Independence Hub
Unless you have been hiding in a cave for the last couple of decades, you have likely heard more than enough versions of the dialogue and plays with words around the changing attitudes and approaches to the long-standing social construct “Retirement.”
Not to mention the numerous metaphors we have applied to interpret this later life transition from a full time working life to…whatever we think we should call it…whatever works for you. In this case, it’s a Victory Lap.
Exactly three years ago in a two-part blog post, I interviewed the then co-authors of the book Victory Lap Retirement: Mike Drak and Jonathan Chevreau, published October 2016. Now in May 2019, the second edition arrived. Based on the success of book sales for version one and some strong endorsements from a number of respected specialists and writers in the financial services field, this no doubt is good cause for this second round.
Beyond those reasons, I asked Mike Drak recently, “What prompted you to arrive at the 2nd edition and add a third contributor, Rob Morrison?”
Mike: “Our intention is to keep revising Victory Lap Retirement as we learn more from ongoing research and also from our own experiences. We added Rob Morrison CFP® as we wanted to release the book in the US and he could bring US expertise to the table as President of financial services firm Huber Financial Advisors, LLC, in Lincolnshire, Illinois. He is well versed with respect to Retirement.”
Smart decision, given the size of the US market and that fact that perspectives are not that much different between the US and Canada when it comes to older adults rethinking pathways in a later life journey. And in this manner, when it comes to co-authors working together as Mike Drak says, “We speak the same language and share the same beliefs that traditional full stop Retirement is a thing of the past and that we need to develop a better concept, one that will work today.”
As I mentioned in my 2016 post on the first review of Victory Lap Retirement, over my twenty years in the career services world, where I worked directly with business executives in their later life transitions – leaving the corporate crow’s nest, as I called it, since 2001 I produced three Retirement programs, delivered countless seminars and engaged many coaching conversations.
During those years, I retooled the concept year by year in response to the evolution of thinking that clients themselves espoused. In addition, in 2003 I presented at a Statistics Canada symposium in Ottawa – New Issues on Retirement — and further gathered in my library as many as nineteen books and stacks of reports, studies and new models on the subject of Retirement.
What of the future? While it is so that the Boomer generation, and now to a growing extent the Gen-X cohort, have been at the forefront in this quest to re-think, re-imagine, re-invent, re-work, re-wire Retirement over those years, I have now come to wonder how things will turn with the next generation of Millennials when they roll in to their 50s by 2030.
From this thought, I posed an aspect of this to Mike Drak, “Given the continuing trend to interruptive or episodic career patterns for workers a various stages of a life course, how does that alter the concept of a V L Retirement?
Mike: “This book was targeted at the Boomer and Gen X crowd. Millennials will need a new approach and I believe traditional Retirement will be a thing of the past. I plan on writing one more book to assist millennials to come up with a game plan for life after leaving school. I believe for them the focus should be on achieving financial independence instead of retirement. They will be working much longer than we did and they will stop and start a number of times in their careers. To be honest I’m worried about them and all the stress that they will be under, hence why I feel the need to write the book.”
Victory Lap Retirement, round two, is a solid reconstruction from the first in 2016, notably content development in the middle chapters 3-6. While a financial focus threads through the book and there seems no escape from the R word, there is to my liking the references to longevity, as in chapter 5 “The Economics of a Victory Lap: The Longevity Play.”
Yet it’s not simply about that chapter’s reference to “longevity of income.” “Health is Wealth” is a sobering chapter 9 of Victory Lap 2 and a reminder that longevity is a promise not a guarantee and how we live that promise in later life is, as spoken in the book, a matter of attitude and finding a sense of purpose, whether it is something new or something revitalized from a former time.
What is there left to say? The old R word framework is no longer an option. If you are looking for a practical and earnest guide to re-framing your goals in later life transitions then Victory Lap Retirement will lead you clearly along – and as in the first edition, the book ends making you ponder the worth of your personal agency – the charge to “live an uncommon life.” I think we should all go find some more of that, as there are several laps to go no matter what age you are.
Mark Venning works with business & non-profit leaders offering presentations, advisory and research services to help in “recoding a longevity society,” finding their fit to meet the shift in aging demographics, and make sense of the emergent longevity economy.
