What Couples Should Talk About When They Talk About Retirement: An interview with "The Couple's Retirement Puzzle" Co-Author Roberta Taylor

When many couples talk about retirement, if they have the conversation at all, they often do not progress beyond the “wouldn’t it be nice” stage: wouldn’t it be nice to live in a warmer climate, to move near the grandchildren; to live overseas. But beyond the “where” of retirement, there is much more couples need to consider. The Couple’s Retirement Puzzle: 10 Must-Have Conversations for Transitioning to the Second Half of Life (Lincoln Street Press) is designed to foster more productive retirement planning to ensure that both partners are on the same page.

“Many people really never sit down to have the planning conversation,” Roberta K. Taylor, who co-wrote the book with Dorian Mintzer, told Millionaire Corner. “Couples will bring up an idea (about what they want to do in retirement) but not what they need to do to make it happen.”

And all too often, Taylor said, each partner’s idea of what would be nice “are very different,” which may account in part for the rise in divorce rates for people over 50.

Taylor and Mintzer are psychotherapists and coaches who specialize in helping couples reinvent their relationships in the figurative second half of life. The Couple’s Retirement Puzzle provides guidelines to help couples address factors about retirement planning, some obvious (money), and  some that can get overlooked (intimacy and sexuality), and “set goals that support a shared vision.”

There are several reasons why couples are not having the retirement conversation, Taylor said. For many, the 2008 economic meltdown took retirement off the table. For others, retirement conversations are comprised of stressful issues that they would rather put off or avoid. There is also the fear of “what if we can’t agree” on plans for life in retirement?

But baby boomers, she said, are re-writing the book on retirement. On the frontlines of “the longevity revolution,” an estimated 78 million boomers and many more seniors “are pioneering a new life stage characterized by living and working longer, developing encore careers and taking advantage of opportunities for growth,” the book states. “The traditional notion of ‘the golden years,’ with Social Security and a condo in Florida, is becoming a thing of the past.”

The prolonged economic downturn has compelled many to reinvent themselves, Taylor said. “People are being laid off and they can’t find jobs. Or they don’t want to continue what they are doing but don’t feel (in this economic climate) that they can retire. Or they love what they do and don’t really want to retire. They don’t see any alternative, but there has been a shift over the past three to five years of people looking to transfer their skills into something entrepreneurial or into the so-called encore career. Remaining vital and living lives with purpose and meaning are becoming more of a priority.”

Taylor was in a similar situation. She was a psychotherapist running an outpatient clinic. She was in her late 50s (she is now 69) when one day, during a meeting, an internal voice told her it was time for a change. “I wasn’t dissatisfied with what I was doing,” she said, “but at that moment it became so clear to me that I needed to be doing something different, something proactive, something creative, something that would enrich and enhance people’s lives. “Everyone says, ‘I would love to write a book,’” she laughed, “but I hadn’t seriously thought about it.”

The Couple’s Retirement Puzzle, she said, fills a gap for a new generation of retirees whose experiences and challenges are different from their parents and grandparents. Generally speaking, she said, “our generation can look forward to living between 20 to 30 so-called bonus years. There wasn’t a lot written for couples about retirement that wasn’t related to finances. Based on our brainstorming and what we were hearing from people about the issues they were facing, I felt we needed to go further.”

The conversation guides in the book evolved from focus groups. Couples, Taylor said, relished the opportunity to talk. “They were excited about sharing their concerns with other couples. They said, ‘Not only do we not talk with each other (about retirement), we don’t talk with other couples either.’”

A way to get the conversation started, Taylor said, is to have the mindset that if a couple wants to have a particular lifestyle, then talking is the only way to achieve that goal. “If you don’t have the conversation and make informed decisions,” she said, “then those decisions will be made for you by default. They must ask themselves if they want to be in charge or do they want to leave it to fate.”

Taylor emphasized that it is okay for partners to agree to disagree on some issues. She found, for example, that men and women approach retirement from different perspectives. “Women, she said, “are concerned about financial security as are men, but men are also focused on identity issues, such as ‘If I’m not an attorney or a businessman, then who am I?’”

The important thing, the book reinforces, is to get a constructive conversation started. That is the key piece to the retirement puzzle.