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Is there anything wrong with making purchases to improve your life in retirement? Absolutely not! However, you need to make a fundamental decision about planning your retirement: Do you want to be sold a lifestyle dreamed up by an advertising agency to sell products? Or do you want to choose a Way to Live based on your own core values, then make conscious purchases that support your choice?
The Retirement Industry Wants You to Have the Right Stuff
The benevolent aspect of marketing is to make you aware of things that you may want or need. If it weren't for marketing, you might never find these things or even know that they exist. (If this book weren't marketed, you probably wouldn't be reading it right now.)
The less benevolent (dare we say malevolent?) aspect of marketing is to influence you to buy things that you really don't need. Or to influence you to buy things that, in that moment, you think you want—but that, if you had a chance to reflect on it, you'd realize you don't really want at all. The marketing is just so darned good that, almost before you know it, you've bought something—or made a big life decision—without considering the alternatives.
The retirement industry wants to define your retirement for you. Instead of choosing a Way to Live, they want you to buy a lifestyle. Instead of reflecting on your values, they want you to value consuming the right investments, the right insurance, the right real estate, the right travel, the right retail goods, and the right antiaging products. Instead of discovering your identity, they want you to simply identify yourself as a consumer. They want images of products and services dancing in your head so that you make acquiring them the goal and the purpose of your retirement. They want consuming to be your highest priority. They want you to believe that if you buy all the right stuff, you'll live the right lifestyle, have "the good life," and have their idea of a good retirement. And if you don't buy all the right stuff, you'll have a bad retirement—an impoverished retirement, an unsafe retirement, a nowhere retirement, a boring retirement, a nobody retirement, an old person's retirement! That's no one's idea of "the good life." In short, they want you to believe that you'll be in pain if you don't buy into their definition of what retirement should be. In fact, more ingeniously, they want you to believe you're in pain already if you haven't yet acquired all the stuff they want you to buy.
The retirement industry isn't bad or evil, any more than a predator like a wolf or a shark is bad or evil. Marketing and selling are just in their DNA. But that doesn't mean that you want to get gobbled up by them, either.
This article is excerpted from 'What Color Is Your Parachute? for Retirement: Planning Now for the Life You Want', written by Richard N. Bolles and John E. Nelson.
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The battle plans for retirement lifestyle marketing are now being laid out. Until recently, marketers have mostly used a simple attack to sell retirement products and services—a carefree, leisure-based lifestyle. However, just as they knew about the Three Boxes of Life, they know about the New Retirement and all of its variations. They're coming up with a variety of retirement lifestyles (lifelong learner, youthful athlete, wise elder, and so on) to dangle in front of you, attached to their products, services, and experiences. The almost subliminal message is this: If you want that particular retirement lifestyle, you can have it. Just get out your credit card.