WSJ's Best Online Tools for Navigating Retirement: Here's Life Planning for You, Kid.

In the Encore section of today's WSJ, the front page article is entitled "The Best Online Tools for Navigating Retirement" and its complete with a photo of a couple contemplating retirement, a photo right out of the 50s.  So I guess that we baby-boomers have become our parents.  I mean I love(d) my parents, but that's pretty depressing, even though I look in the mirror each morning shaving and I see my dad.  Thanks a lot.

Anyway, since this article is behind the pay-wall, I'll just list the "best on-line tools" in a series of posts and give you a short description.  This is my first post in that series.

LifePlanningforYou.com.  Here is this site's welcome:

Welcome to your path to freedom. That is what financial Life Planning is all about—the freedom to find your dreams, and to bring them alive. Life Planning helps you reorganize your relationship to money so that your financial resources are dedicated to supporting your life of greatest value, meaning and purpose. 

This sounds vaguely religious.  Yet this is the WSJ's "favorite." It "offers a free series of introspective exercises," probably because us boomers are pretty flabby with that sort of thing, introspection I mean.  We are notoriously outwardly directed when we are not smoking pot. We've got to get in touch with our inner selves or risk defaulting to the Villages. The site also provides links to "financial planners trained in 'life planning.'"  Life Planning "focuses on helping clients clarify their goals, values and priorities before planning their finances." 

Actually, the couple in the photo appear to be happy.  (Although it disturbs me that they are not holding hands - its sort of a knuckle-bumping walk into retirement, I guess.)  Maybe they have their future pretty much squared away.  Probably because they saved a lot of money over the years buying their clothes at Goodwill.

No Crime and No Kids, A "Community" of No Future, But the Fastest Growing Metro Area in the US

Thus, the Villages in Central Florida.  Like something out of a Dystopian Future.  From the article by Toluse Olorunnipa:

“It’s like an adult Disney World,” Conkle, 77, said of The Villages, Florida, whose expansion has come with virtually no crime, traffic, pollution — or children.

The mix has attracted flocks of senior citizens, making The Villages the world’s largest retirement community. Its population of 110,000 has more than quadrupled since 2000, U.S. Census Bureau data show. It rose 5.2 per cent last year, on par with megacities like Lagos, Nigeria, and Dhaka, Bangladesh.

*   *   *

Following an age-restricted model used by developer Del Webb’s Sun City in Arizona, The Villages emerged as growth among the elderly began outpacing all other age groups.

The over-65 population in the U.S. increased 74 per cent between 1970 and 2000, more than twice the rate of those 64 and younger, census figures show.

The comparison between the Villages and "megacities like Lagos, Nigerian, and Dhaka, Bangladesh," drips with irony.

"The Juvenilization of the American Church"

The editors of CT chose a story to feature on it its June 2012 issue titled "When are We Going to Grow Up? The Juvenilization of American Christianity," by Thomas E. Berger.  (The complete article is available at the link.) Berger, who teaches youth ministry at Huntington University, adapted it from his new book The Juvenilization of American Christianity (Eerdmans, 2012).  It is controversial and challenging.

Berger asserts that "[t]he white evangelical churches that are growing the fastest in America are the ones that look most like the successful youth ministries of the 1950s and '60s."  He states "even otherwise exemplary youth ministries could unintentionally send the message that the church or even God exists to help me on my journey of self-development."   Finally, he concludes

Today many Americans of all ages not only accept a Christianized version of adolescent narcissism, they often celebrate it as authentic spirituality. God, faith, and the church all exist to help me with my problems. Religious institutions are bad; only my personal relationship with Jesus matters. If we believe that a mature faith involves more than good feelings, vague beliefs, and living however we want, we must conclude that juvenilization has revitalized American Christianity at the cost of leaving many individuals mired in spiritual immaturity.

My observations lead me to believe that it is not simply the American Church that is juvenilized, it is the American culture, even Western culture that is so.

I spoke to a client of mine recently, a married man in his early 60s who sold his business several years ago, one he had developed with a lot of hard work and great business acumen, and who now mainly plays golf.  He and his wife (no children) have just moved to a place called The Villages.  "Paul," he said, "the place is like high school on steroids!"  He admitted that he could not see them living there for more than a few years, but he was clearly amazed at this wildly successful retirement community near Ocala.

Last night, Carol and I saw The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel.  It is delightful, with a glittering British cast.  A British married couple, and four singles, two men and two women, all commencing retirement.  Each of them has a different story but all have concluded they must leave England to live out their lives with a chance at happiness.  They find themselves in a dilapidated hotel in Jaipur, India, on the basis of photo-shopped photos at the hotel's website.  In one way or another, each of them needs to grow up.  Many of them fit the juvenile stereotype, and the hotel seemed to promise a sort of "Villages" model with elephants.  (I stole that last line from the movie.)  It was very entertaining to see them grow (or not, in one case), and the third act was pure Hollywood, but that was entirely OK.  It was fun!  The message was there, however, one must escape from Western culture to find the adult in him.

Not so different from what Berger might say.