For many couples, deciding when to retire can be much more challenging than finding the money to fund retirement. That’s because this decision involves so much more than money, including age differences, career satisfaction, family structure and gender roles.
Financial advisors can play a crucial role here, helping clients bridge the gap between their visions of the future. In fact, new research suggests that partners who share with each other how they envision their retirement enjoy greater psychological well-being and financial stability after leaving their work lives behind.
“The transition into retirement, in some ways, is like the transition into parenthood,” says Angela Curl, professor at the University of Missouri and author of a study entitled Anticipatory Socialization for Retirement: A Multilevel Dyadic Model.
“When couples prepare to become parents, they do a lot of planning for the future,” explains Curl. “They spend time thinking: ‘How might our relationship change? How will our lives be different? And what do we need to do to accommodate this life change?'”
But, as many partners age, they fail to maintain this level of mutual preparation. In Curl’s analysis, she concentrated on married couples 45 years of age or older and who worked full- or part-time. Curl found that when one spouse planned, the other spouse was also more likely to map out his or her future.
Research has shown that failure to prepare for retirement makes individuals more likely to be depressed and less likely to adapt successfully to the life change.
However, the study found, while planning for retirement produces positive outcomes, such as improved psychological well-being, greater financial stability and better role adjustment, couples do not participate equally.
Being older, white, earning higher income and possessing greater retirement wealth all predicted a greater likelihood of “anticipatory socialization” – thinking about and discussing retirement – between spouses.
For wives, specifically, having a health problem that limited work or a husband who was looking forward to retirement predicted more anticipatory socialization.
For husbands, higher education, more depressive symptoms and lower occupational status were the more important drivers.
“Sometimes, individuals have unrealistic expectations about what retirement will be like,” Curl notes. “Individuals can envision retirement one way; but if their spouses don’t envision retirement the same way, it can be problematic.”
Putting such incompatible thoughts in writing may help spouses adopt a more objective outlook, suggests Eli Finkel, professor of psychology at Northwestern University.
Finkel worked with two groups of couples, in which one was assigned a reappraisal exercise and the other was not. Every four months for two years, all partners reported on their overall relationship satisfaction, including a detailed summary of the most significant disagreement they’d experienced with their spouse in the preceding period.
Those asked to reappraise also were invited to write briefly about their most recent disagreement with their partner from the perspective of a neutral third party – such as an advisor.
The results were striking. Although couples in the two groups disagreed just as frequently and with equal severity, the reappraising couples were much less distressed by these squabbles, which helped them to sustain their overall relationship.
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