Doing Well by Doing Good (and Giving Back)

Whatever happened to the "Me Generation," the not-too-flattering description of the supposedly self-centered baby boomer generation? It turns out we're not so bad after all, according to an article in yesterday's Rochester Democrat & Chronicle:

"Though sometimes referred to as the "me" generation, research is exposing boomers as "we" activists with a humanitarian focus. Sixty percent of boomers believe that work in retirement should help the community, according to a 2005 survey by Princeton Research Associates. Boomers name education, health care, youth, arts and culture and the environment as issues to tackle. Women in their 50s are especially mission-driven, with 70 percent saying it is very important that a job in retirement "give you a sense of purpose."
This is not news to us or our regular readers, but I just thought I'd mention it as a followup to my article on "paid volunteerism." - Bob

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Benefits of Delaying Social Security

I occasionally plow through dreary assessments of how little we boomers are inclined to save and the risks that creates with our retirement prospects…. I do this reading for you, so you won’t have to :-) Occasionally a gem of wisdom will pop out, making it all worthwhile. And those, of course I will pass along. So from an Economic and Budget Issue Brief from the Congressional Budget Office, dated March 14, 2004, entitled “The Retirement Prospects of the Baby Boomers,” comes an excellent and concise summary from a section entitled “The Effects of Delaying Retirement”: "For households facing shortfalls in their retirement savings, relatively small changes in behavior can have surprisingly large effects. Because people who retire at 62 can expect to live another 20 years, each year they postpone retirement reduces their need for retirement savings by about 5 percent. An extra year of work also increases their Social Security benefits by several percent. Taken together, those effects
Read more

Pay Back Your Social Security
It Could Be the Best Annuity You Could Buy

The above title was the original title of yesterday's post , which later became " Social Security Decisions: Important But Not Irrevocable - You Have Much More Flexibility Than You May Think ." I actually posted it with the "Annuity" title above, but after sleeping on it overnight, I realized that yesterday's article was really about flexibility, an important issue in its own right. I have written before about flexibility. The general rule is, "Given two equally attractive decisions, always choose the one that is more "reversible," (i.e. allows you to change your mind later) Flexibilty is a key element in any personal financial decision, and retirement decisions are no exception. In fact, I think flexibility becomes MORE important as you get older, as youre "wiggle room" for creating alternatives diminishes the older you get. And I wrote on this before, in my original article, " Don't Do It ," as a major reason why
Read more

How Long Will You Live? Just Click Here!

I just came across a short blog article on the Seattle PI web site that it turns out was written by one of our Platinum recommended bloggers, Rita Robison. I recommended Rita's blog, The Survive and Thrive Boomer Guide , in an article on March 19th. The title of Rita's article was " I'm going to live to be 97. How about you? " You can probably see how that caught my attention. Rita has found a website with a very neat " life expectancy calculator " that asks you a series of questions as it calculates your life expectancy. One of the neat things about it is that it does these calculations as you go along, so even if the ultimate estimate is not accurate (it seems a little generous to me), it's very instructive to go through the exercise. There's nothing like watching your life expectancy drop as you move the slider down to "light exercise" from "moderate exercise," or admit to higher stress levels, how much alcohol you d
Read more