WalletPop

What fun is retiring well-off if you're not all there to enjoy the ride?

Anyone unfortunate to have witnessed the ravages of Alzheimer's certainly understands. But almost all of us have experienced some kind of preview of diminished capacity to come -- glasses "lost" perched right atop our brows; forgetting whether or not you just took that vitamin; mentally misplacing long-burned-in info, like your mom's birthday. It starts earlier than most of us want to admit.

There's good news, in the form of research showing the brain has more plasticity than previously thought. In laymen's terms, our aging brains can likely benefit from regular exercise, to help stave off what was previously written off as inevitable, age-induced, mental atrophy.

This just in: you need a certain amount of money to retire comfortably. Experts caution this number varies widely person to person, and can be of unsettlingly-large magnitude.

Let's all thank the marketing geniuses at ING for these deep insights, courtesy of a new, eight-figure marketing push that attaches a bright orange dollar figure -- literally -- to nattily-attired Boomers populating the firm's new TV ads.

That flushing sound you hear is millions more marketing dollars going down the toilet, as yet another financial services supermarket gets ready, fires, then aims at the $10 trillion in assets controlled by Boomers moving toward retirement.

It's every player's dream: to hand-pick their next coach. Ask certain big-name free agents why they moved from the Patriots to the Jets, then quit Gang Green for the Cowboys. They'll chant in unison, "I wanted to play for Bill (Parcells) again."

Now that Brett Favre has called it quits, he's in prime position to do that very same thing: get choosy about his coach.

Huh? Favre's next coach? This guy know something ESPN doesn't?

The recent news on the mass retirement of air traffic controllers was stunning on many levels. For one, the sheer numbers and their potential impact on safety and on-time travel. Of nearly 13,000 fully certified controllers on the job in September, 2002, only some 11,000 remain today.

A Wall Street Journal piece deemed the exodus reasonably predictable, as many controllers hired in the wake of Reagan's 1981 mass firing of 12,000 striking controllers are now becoming eligible to retire. The problem: the FAA can't bring trainees into the system fast enough. And for me, the real kicker: bonuses as high as $24,000 are mostly failing to retain retiring controllers.

Talk about the next great example of brain drain, and of extraordinary opportunity for you if you're on the cusp of retirement. You don't need to go to flight school. It's across the board.

My PhD reads psychology, not economics, so I won't bet the house on the Bush stimulus package's chances of preventing or softening a recession.

But I have counseled and coached many who were outright terminated, downsized out, or who feared a pink slip in their next pay envelope. The conversations typically move from money to the things that more fundamentally bring us fulfillment -- or that should. The menu usually includes priority setting and value re-ordering, with a healthy side of blessing counting.

Fear of job loss or not, times like these are ripe for thinking ahead to how we'll feel, and what we'll do when we retire, and the regular paycheck stops. (Yes, there are Social Security checks, pension benefits and annuity streams. But trust me, none of these feel as "earned" as a paycheck.)