Michelle Oram has spent the last few years planning what she will do when she retires from her job at Manulife later this month.
Oram, 59, has been making what she calls her Curious List: a list of things she wants to do in retirement.
“I might get to all of them. I might get to none of them. It just depends what’s going on.”
Oram wants to brush up on the German she learned in high school and maybe travel to Germany. She wants to focus more on her singing.
She also plans to spend a lot of time helping other retirees thrive in this next stage of their life. She was recently certified as a retirement coach, and wants to write a book and blog about longevity.
Oram spent most of her 23 years at Manulife working with group retirement plans, so she knows well how different plans work. But planning for retirement is about more than saving enough for housing or emergencies, she says.
“Too many people do not think about what they are going to do with their time,” she said. They may have ensured they have enough savings to cover their expenses, but not enough activities or social connections to fill the empty hours on their calendar.
Oram is not the only one who has noticed that more Canadians are thinking about the non-financial aspects of their retirement. Retirement planning is no longer just about finances. And retirement is not just about vacations or leisure.
“What we’re seeing, specifically from the Baby Boomer generation, is that they want to do more,” said Jennifer Rovet, who has worked as a retirement coach in Toronto since 2019.
“They don’t want to just stop and do nothing. They want to keep having an active life. A lot of them are very fit and healthy, and they’ve got many, many years ahead of them.”
The average life expectancy in Canada is 81.5 years. In 2023, Canadians retired, on average, at age 65, Statistics Canada data shows. This means people can spend between 15 and 30 years retired — almost the length of their careers.
But while more individuals are turning to retirement coaches to help them consider the non-financial parts of retirement, most companies only offer programs that help employees think about the financial side of retirement.
“I do think the industry is a little bit slow to get on board with the fact that in a world of increased longevity, retirement is going to have to look different than what it has,” said Oram.
Brian Lambier, a career coach in Calgary, says that public companies are more likely than private companies to offer programs to help employees who are nearing retirement think about what their life will look like after their career ends.
“I always look at retirement as just one part of the career journey,” he said. “It just happens to be at the end, where schooling would be at the beginning.”
Employers spend a lot of time onboarding employees and training them at the beginning of their careers, he says. The same amount of attention and focus needs to be given to the end of their careers.
The biggest struggle many new retirees face is establishing a personal identity and social connections outside of their workplaces. This can cause many retirees to struggle with loneliness, a problem Canadian Affairs has previously covered.
“A lot of people find a lot of their sense of purpose and meaning in their life and their identity in work that they do,” says Lambier.
“When [work] is removed, they start floundering, and they don’t really know the direction that they’re going. They do not know who they are anymore, because they can no longer define themselves by what they do. They have to define themselves by who they are.”
‘Holistic planning’
Some organizations are starting to help employees think more about the non-financial aspects of retirement.
Beginning last year, Ontario Municipal Employees’ Retirement System (OMERS), which manages the pensions of more than 600,000 municipal employees in Ontario, began offering workshops to help employees who are nearing retirement consider what they want to do during retirement.
“We have always done a really good job of preparing people financially to retire,” said Celine Chiovitti, chief pension officer for OMERS. OMERS is a defined-benefit pension, so employees have more certainty about how much their pension will be.
“What we’re starting to lean into now is more holistic planning about retirement,” she said.
At pre-retirement workshops, employees are given workbooks that help them consider how they spend their time now and how they might spend it after they retire.
“It is moving away from ‘I’m going to retire and do nothing’, to ‘It is an exciting time in your life’.”
Chiovitti says she has seen many retired workers become consultants or return to the workforce in other ways, such as retired nurses returning to work during Covid.
Workplaces need to use the skills and expertise of older workers, says Chiovitti.
“As the Baby Boomers are approaching retirement, they are taking a lot of knowledge with them. The sector still needs them,” she said. “We need to start to really value what older people have to bring, whether it’s sort of mentorship or wisdom or just their ability to continue to contribute.”
“I think there’s a lot of opportunity for organizations to leverage intergenerational collaboration,” said Simon Chan, founder and CEO of Adapt with Intent, a consulting firm that helps individuals and organizations change how they think about retirement.
More businesses should find ways to have retired workers involved in their work, he says.
“Oftentimes we talk about longer lives as terrible risks,” he said. “There is a huge opportunity for us to think about how we modernize our structures so that we actually extract the benefits out of it.”
As much as Michelle Oram is excited that she only has a few workdays left before her retirement, she feels nervous about some parts of it.
She can retire now because she spent her career saving. Soon, she will watch the numbers in her bank account decrease instead of increase. “I honestly think it will take a year or so to get my head around that,” she said.But she has a celebration planned before the psychological reality of retirement begins to set in. One of the first items on her retirement to-do list is travelling to California to celebrate her 60th birthday.
Great article! One important activity that the article only alludes to briefly is the benefits of volunteering for older adults – this demographic benefits more from volunteering than any other. Volunteering can give people a sense of purpose, structure and social connection, which translates to better overall health and may even extend your life. It truly is a great aging-in-place strategy.