"Repurposement"

The book, Repurposement, was inspired by a USA Today survey that said the number one activity of most retirees is … watching TV. That’s it! I realized that I’ve been trying to get people to pay attention to their futures in retirement only to realize that our definition of retirement is broken. Why should anyone work like a dog, saving for the future, when the picture of our future is as uninspiring as a remote control and a La-Z-Boy?

Repurposement is about casting a new vision for retirement, about saving and stewardship and how to purposefully handle money for the future, but with a purpose-driven mindset. I'm not only interested in helping to raise the bar on the retirement plan industry, but I’d also like to see the participants within those plans benefit. I’m trying to capture everything I’ve taught for years to plan participants in the idea of utilizing the first half of our lives (the working years) to launch us into the second half of our lives (the repurposement years). 

~ Troy L. Redstone

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READ: The Forward

I must admit, when Troy first mentioned that he was writing a book about people being more engaged for retirement, my first reaction was possibly like some of you, “just what we need, another self-help/saving for retirement book!” 

However, what I have learned over my years of knowing and working with Troy Redstone is that he is unabashedly willing to take risks and reinvent ideas in innovative ways that others only catch up to later.  As an example, I remember hearing Troy once speak about “Financial Wellness” at least two years before that phrase became a household term in the retirement plan universe. 

And so it is no surprise that Troy is not writing a book about each of us doing a better job to improve our financial conditions for when we retire; he is challenging us all to reach a whole new PURPOSE for WHY we retire to begin with.  Only then can we truly find the motivation to save in ways we never thought possible. 

Using personal anecdotes, statistics and real-life examples, REPURPOSEMENT gives a completely different frame of reference beyond “saving more for retirement”.  Troy uses his years of working in the pulpit, the boardroom and breakroom to allow each of us to find the larger purpose that is in each of our lives, regardless of economic means and individual circumstances. 

I invite you to REPURPOSE your life!   

Brian M. Johnston, Attorney at Law

Jackson Lewis

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READ: The Introduction

Retirement probably became personal to me about a dozen years ago when my own father, Gary, moved into retirement. I've watched how it worked (or how the math didn't work) for him. And I can't help but think that the path he's on now was so avoidable. It had much less to do with the economy and market conditions and things that are beyond our control; it had a ton to do with poor planning, or lack of planning. My dad did not plan or prepare well for retirement, which is typical of many Americans today. Every day, about 50,000 more American workers are moving into retirement, but it's a very uncertain retirement, one fraught with dangers and pitfalls, one that is only a slight misstep of health care concern away from financial catastrophe. Even those American workers who prepared, who sat down and thought through the math, are finding that the math doesn't work so well now that retirement is upon them.

To understand what happened to Gary you probably need to understand a thing or two about Gary. My dad is a big man, 6'8" in his prime. He's also brilliant, the mind of an engineer, great at problem solving, never met a puzzle he couldn't figure out, whether it involved carpentry, electrical engineering, plumbing, technical wiring, aviation or automotive engineering, or anything related to a combustible engine. The mind of an engineer ... just not the engineering degree. He's extremely bright but he wasn't educated in the traditional way. Instead of going to college, he served in the Air Force. After leaving the service he worked for 40 long, hard years and retired from the only real job he ever had.

Remember when people used to write hand-written notes, back before the advent of email? These days about the only person in my life who consistently puts pen to paper is my 92-year-old grandmother. Well my dad is the guy who used to bring you those handwritten notes from your grandma. He was a mailman, a postal carrier, for forty years. He really was a blue-collar worker -- all of his uniforms were blue. His dad was the Post Master in our town, and he followed in the "family business" of sorts. It was a respectable Civil Service job back then and it provided for our family. He wasn't afraid of hard work, even took a second job when I went to college to help me pay for school. He worked long, hard days, especially at Christmas, and then for a period of time, when I was in college, he left the day job to work late into the night with a second job.

As a Civil Service employee the pay wasn't outstanding, but it was good, consistent, steady, and the benefits were outstanding. The National Association of Letter Carriers provided a pension plan and since they were government funded there was less concern about that pension plan drying up. It was a fairly simple system. You put in your time and they take care of you when your time is up. Gary kind of did some math in his head, plus he knew the math had worked for his dad when he retired, but somehow the math's been a little fuzzy for my dad since he left.

Here's the point: you know that there were attorneys and actuaries and high-priced financial advisors in thousand dollar suits who met with the trustees of that billion-dollar pension plan, but no one ever talked to Gary. The advisors and consultants never left the board room, and walked out on the floor and talked to Gary and his colleagues. No one ever talked to Gary about how much he was saving or just the fact that he even needed to save something additional to what the pension would provide. And so he didn't. Like a lot of people, he had a basic distrust of the stock market, so investing for him would have been like gambling. He saved a bit in the bank, he tried not to go too much into debt, but there was never much extra.

And then there's Social Security. Today Social Security provides, on average, about a third of what retirees actually need to retire. And if it's a third today it's unlikely to be even close to a third in the future. I am not among those who believe it will completely go away by the time I retire; I think it's just too much of a political hot potato to drop completely. But I'm definitely of the opinion that it will become a smaller and smaller portion of what we actually need to retire. We can all tout the failures and the shortfalls of the Social Security system, but in fairness it's actually working pretty much as it was originally designed to work.

In the Social Security Act of 1935 there is a word used promiscuously and that word is "supplemental." In other words, the original intent was for the government to supplement what we were doing and what your employer was doing. It was never meant to provide everything we needed in retirement. And it still supplements -- by about a third for most retirees -- even though funding for the program is beginning to dry up. But the point is that when Social Security was introduced it didn't mean we were off the hook. We still had responsibility.

And today our responsibility and burden is greater than ever. The fact that most employers have phased out pension plans (only 7% of Fortune 500 companies still offered the traditional company pension plan as of 2013, according to a Towers Watson study) and Social Security is expected to provide a smaller and smaller supplement in retirement means the burden is shifting squarely back to our portion, to our responsibility to save more. I'd apologize for being the bearer of bad news here but you'd have to be living under a rock in a cave on Mars to not know that this is the state of the crisis we face as a nation.

By the way, do you know how most Americans retire today? After the pensions dried up and the government dollars ran short, the increasingly common means of retiring today is to get a second job in retirement. Seems like a pretty lousy definition of retirement, but that's reality for a lot of people. I call it the Wal-Mart retirement plan. "Hi. Welcome to Wal-Mart." When I go there and see someone the age of my parents standing at the door I always have two thoughts. My first thought is, "God bless her, I hope she's enjoying what she's doing," and every once in a while the greeters are smiling and they look as if it's not such an awful job. But my second, almost immediate thought is, "I'll bet that's not how she pictured her retirement. I'll bet she didn't work a whole long, hard time down at the factory or the Post Office or the plant so that she could stand at the door of Wal-Mart and greet me when I came to buy my toiletries. I'll bet that wasn't her retirement dream."

A second job you enjoy, a second job that’s really just a glorified hobby, a second job that you want, a second job that's fulfilling your passion – that’s different. In fact, that’s kind of what "repurposement" is all about.

But what if it’s not a job you want to have, just a job you have to have … to make ends meet? What if you have to keep working to pay the bills? You’d better hope that you’re physically able to keep working.

When I walk into a Home Depot I look for someone who looks like my dad because I hardly know which end of the hammer to hold. I’m clueless in there. My dad, on the other hand, has always been very handy and very knowledgeable about all of that stuff: plumbing, electricity, all of that. You name it and my dad can fix it. I’m amazed by how smart he is and how little of it I inherited. Gary would be great in a place where he could just give DIY advice all day, like a Home Depot. And if he chooses to work there because he enjoys it or because it gets him out of the house, great. I’d just hate for him to have to work there because of poor planning. I look for someone who looks like my dad … but I don’t really want it to be my dad. Gary walked many miles delivering mail and I’d like for him to just be able to rest now, if he wants to.  Working at Home Depot isn’t Gary’s retirement dream.

Retirement dream? No. But Retirement Reality for millions of Americans today. And it's just sad.

I guess it has been growing increasingly sad for many years but it became personal to me when it became my dad. Today when I'm walking the floors of the shop of one of my clients I see Gary ... I see folks that just need someone to care enough to provide some guidance and preparation for the largest financial purchase of their lives.

And I believe it's possible to correct the ship and lay the foundation for the next generation of American workers to actually retire healthy and wealthy. It won't be easy, but nothing that's really worth attaining is ever easy.

This book isn't about easy.

This book is about providing a roadmap, a solution, and the encouragement and hope to address a growing problem in our country.

It's about Repurposement, how to retire healthy and wealthy.