They don’t want to admit they’re getting older, but your baby boomer clients are about to enter their “golden years.” The leading edge of Canada’s nine million baby boomers — born between 1947 and 1965 — is now 58. Some have retired from their first careers. In two years, they’ll be eligible for early Canada Pension Plan benefits. As they have been throughout their lives, boomers will be a force to be reckoned with in retirement.

Here’s what some experts on aging say you can expect from your boomer clients in coming years.

> Retirement

Boomers will continue to work, even if they “retire,” says Barry LaValley, president of Nanaimo, B.C.-based Retirement Lifestyle Centre and a faculty member of the Canadian Institute for Elder Planning Studies. “For the boomers, status is linked to generating income.”

Peggy Grall, a Milton, Ont., psychologist who works with people going through life transitions, agrees. “As they leave their first careers, the boomers are opening coffee shops and making canoes in their basements,” she says. “They want their second careers to be a lot more fun than their first. It’s not about money — it’s the hobby, the passion they’re pursuing.”

In fact, LaValley says, the word “retirement” will probably disappear from our vocabularies in the next 10 years. “We’re now seeing something called ‘reverse retirement’,” he says, referring to the phenomenon of people retiring, then moving back into the workforce.

“Ten years ago, the rate of reverse retirement was 4%; last year, it was 8%,” he says. “People can’t afford to do nothing today — and people don’t want to do nothing.”

LaValley, 51, cites a Statistics Canada study released in March that shows that a third of all new jobs have been created by people aged 55 and older. “We’re seeing a huge move into self-employment,” he says. “Age 55 in our society is just too young to retire. When retirement was first set up as a social concept in the 1930s, age 65 was chosen as the retirement age based on life expectancy. Based on life expectancy today, the retirement age should be 78.”

> Housing

Some experts don’t foresee boomers downsizing their housing — at least, not yet. “In the mid-’90s, the pundits were predicting real estate valuations would be decreasing by now as boomers got older,” says David Cork, director of ScotiaMcLeod in Ottawa and author of The Pig and the Python and Bulls, Bears and Pigs, which looks at aging boomers. “They were wrong because of their interpretation of ‘need’ and ‘want.’ The boomers whose children have left home don’t need big homes but they want them. Raising the kids was expensive; now they’re indulging themselves — buying even bigger houses, cottages and boats.”

Cork suggests that many seniors are storing their wealth in real estate.
“We’re also a generation that needs to demonstrate how well we’re doing,” says Cork, who at 45 is right in the middle of the boomer pack. “We can’t very well show off our investment statements. And another great thing about real estate is no one knows how much of it we actually own.”
Downsizing will take place when aging knees, hips and backs make it difficult to move around those monster homes. “Forty per cent of all Canadians over 65 have some form of limited mobility,” says LaValley. “When an entire generation hits that stage, the whole psychology of housing will change.”

There are a lot of single boomers and childless boomers, notes Rhonda Latreille, president and CEO of Vancouver-based Canadian Academy of Senior Advisors Inc. New housing models will develop in coming years, she says: “There’s a movement in the U.S. called “golden-girl homes” — single women living together. I can envision golden-girl homes in those big, boomer houses.”

> Income in retirement

After indulging themselves, will the boomers have enough money to live on? Studies have shown that many Canadians now in their 40s and 50s don’t think they have put enough money away for retirement. “Down the road, we could find ourselves on Generation X’s doorstep,” says LaValley.

But although the consumer debt load has never been higher — and the boomers will be taking this debt with them into their golden years — they’ll also be inheriting from their parents, says John Crawford, a 73-year-old Vancouver gerontologist and CASA’s vice president of education. He doesn’t think the boomers will take their financial security for granted; they’ll want to make sure they’re covered. By continuing to work, they may catch up on their savings in coming years.