Your Career Choices at Midlife

Baby boomers are a different breed from previous generations, and we demand different choices for retirement. Forty years and a gold watch wasn’t going to do it for me so after 25 years I made the choice to leave Corporate America and pursue my passion to “do it my way.”

So what choices are you facing as a baby boomer?

Previous generations retired after working for one company for 25-30 years, and after that stint, they got a pension plan. Retirees had a small house paid for, a nice Social Security check and a pension. Add to that a life expectancy of around 70 years, and you’ll have a perfect retirement plan. (Unfortunately, my dad didn’t get to enjoy his retirement because he passed away at age 52.)

Nowadays it’s a different reality for sure. Life expectancies are creeping up past 80, pension plans are quickly disappearing, and full retirement is no longer at age 65, but rather 66, plus we can expect that to change even more in the future. The fact that so many of us baby boomers are poorly prepared financially doesn’t help the future outlook.

So, more and more, boomers, like myself, are seeking entrepreneurial opportunities to help shore up their inadequate retirement savings.

But businesses can and do fail, often.

Think about the math of failure and recovery. If you start a business when you’re around 50 years old, and it takes about four years to fail, how able will you be to start yet another venture when you’re closer to retirement age?

Networking is hard both off and online. Handshaking and backslapping takes a lot of effort for offline promoters, and web cash flow takes entirely new techniques.

Being on your own means you set your own procedures and policies, serve as your own human resources, sales, marketing, payroll, tax and accounting departments, plus fax and phone answerer – the list goes on and on.

Regardless of how you envision your golden years, you still have to plan for some type of retirement; whether it is off to the Caribbean or possibility in an assisted living facility. How you choose to live in the future will be determined by you choose to live RIGHT NOW.

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