Long Island Retirement Costly For Boomers But It's Home

John Lindstrom, 62, entertains the thought of retiring to Sanibel Island in Florida, but plans on staying in Long Island, for now.

By Richard Bambrick
Richard.Bambrick@gmail.com

When the actor Dennis Hopper tells baby boomers in a current television commercial -- “You’re going to turn retirement upside down,” he just may be understating the obvious. Some 77 million baby boomers in America are beginning to hit retirement age, and this population bulge is expected by the U.S. Census Bureau to swell the percentage of retirees living in communities across the country to over 13 percent by 2010. Nearly a million of these retiring boomers live on Long Island, in Nassau and Suffolk counties, and in the New York City boroughs of Brooklyn and Queens.

The emerging “baby boomer retirement market” is already spawning new businesses. Mr. Hopper’s commercial is for Ameriprise Financial, which, like Merrill Lynch [and numerous others], is creating a financial services unit specifically for retiring baby boomers. Major insurance companies, such as MetLife and MassMutual, are establishing “baby boomer retirement annuity” programs. Jeff Taylor, founder of the employment website Monster.com, has created Eons.com, which he describes as a MySpace for baby boomers. Along with such interesting services as an “obituary alert,” Eons is sprinkled with retirement blogs, chat rooms, and directories to retirement services.

A major question about this huge wave of potential retirees market is simple: Where will they live? Will they “retire in place,” as the U.S. Census Bureau terms it, or will they migrate to warmer climates and more retirement-friendly communities? According to a recent AARP report, nine out of 10 potential retirees will stay in the same community they spent their working lives in, many in the same house. The reasons for staying home or moving vary but it usually comes down to financial realities versus your roots in the community.

For Long Islanders, staying here after retirement can be an expensive proposition. Nassau County, in particular, is one of the costliest counties in the nation. For instance, in Nassau it will take a retirement income of $50,000 to live as well as you can in Charleston, S.C., on $33,500. Even in Palm Springs, CA, a high-end retirement mecca, you only need $41,000 to get what $50,000 buys in Nassau, and you don’t have to shovel snow.

Nonetheless, many Baby Boomers preparing to retire expect to do it right here, hopefully in their current homes, although “downsizing” of their residences is a recurring theme.

“In the short term, we’re not going anywhere,” says John Lindstrom, a 62-year-old former computer manager for banking services companies who hasn’t worked for five years, but is not sure he considers himself retired. “I feel like I’m not old enough to be retired.”

A resident of Rockville Centre, NY, Mr. Lindstrom is a Vietnam combat veteran who keeps fit through a regimen of running, swimming, bicycling and tennis. He took a pension plan buyout from J.P. Morgan Chase shortly after 9/11. He was an active investor who had accumulated more than enough net worth in the stock-market boom of the 1990s to consider early retirement to the island of Sanibel off the coast of Ft. Myers, Fla., where he and his wife Debbie had purchased a condominium.

“It was an impulse buy,” Mr. Lindstrom now says. “It was one of those days when the market went up 300 points and I told Debbie we made enough money on that one day to make the down payment.”

That was shortly before the bubble burst and Internet stocks took a tumble at the end of 1991. Their retirement plans changed. Mr. Lindstrom’s portfolio shrunk, and the Sanibel condo became a white elephant he had to sell three years later at a loss.

Today, the stock market has improved to the point where the Lindstroms are back on solid financial ground for retirement, but their circumstances have changed. Mrs. Lindstrom became a grandmother for the first time. Her son through a previous marriage lives in Manhattan with his wife and the new baby, and Mrs. Lindstrom is no longer enthusiastic about moving to Florida.

“From Debbie’s point of view, a lot of it is the kids,” says Mr. Lindstrom, who also has grown children living in the New York area. “We’re presuming we’re going to end up staying here and travel a lot -- as much as the budget will allow,” he says, acknowledging it is very expensive to live in Rockville Centre, and they may have to downsize. “We need to reduce our monthly outflow.”

Working Two Jobs After a Buyout and Loving It

Like the Lindstroms, Jerome and Margie Montuori of Oceanside, N.Y., plan to retire on Long Island primarily because their children are here. Their financial circumstances, however, are far different. Mr. Montuori, 60 years old, grew up in Brooklyn and Queens, and moved to the Oceanside neighborhood that his wife grew up in shortly after they married.

He is the second youngest of fifteen children, nine boys and six girls, most of whom have stayed on Long Island, raising their own families in Nassau and Suffolk. A few of his siblings have migrated west to Arizona and New Mexico, but Mr. Montuori has no plans to leave. “Margie and Janine (his daughter) are like sisters,” he says. “We’re going to stay around our kids.”

To stay here, Mr. Montuori is certain he can not afford to retire at 65, at least not completely. He had built a career as a printer, and as a member of Amalgamated Lithographers, Local One. In the early 1990s, the printing industry went into a deep decline that was exacerbated by computerized printing operations that eliminated a lot of jobs. Mr. Montuori’s union was in trouble, and his pension was not secure, so he took a 51-percent buyout of the pension, and got out of the business.

For the past 10 years, Mr. Montuori has worked as a per-diem inspector for a sub-contractor to Verizon, a job which offers neither health insurance benefits nor a pension, but is on an early-morning shift which frees him in the afternoons for a second job, which he relishes. “I’m a maintenance and repair man for five group homes in Nassau County for autistic adults,” he said.

Montuori said he has developed personal relationships and great fondness for many of the people living in those homes, and takes a lot of satisfaction from his work keeping those homes up and livable. “Having my projects every day, seeing my residents, it’s fun for me,” he said.

Of equal importance to the satisfaction he gets from his second job is the fact that he is employed by New York State, and gets health benefits for himself and his family, along with a pension.

“Health care is a pretty scary thing to think about if you don’t have it,” he says.

Although he will be eligible for Medicare coverage at the age of sixty-five, Mrs. Montuori is ten years younger than him. She works part-time as a school-crossing guard in Rockville Centre, and has recently become a licensed realtor working out of Century 21. Neither job offers healthcare benefits, so Mrs. Montuori relies on her husband’s state health insurance plan. He plans to stay with the homes after the age of sixty-five not only because he likes the work, but because he needs the benefits.

The Girls Are Gone So Why Stay?

If anybody is a candidate to retire and move away from Long Island, it is James F., a 60-year-old father of four in Kings Park, NY, who asks not to be fully identified because he offers an open look into his personal finances. The reasons one would expect him to move away are both financial and personal. His three daughters have already left the island, having decided they could never afford homes here. Two have moved to Syracuse, the hometown of their husbands, and the third is a school teacher in the Washington, D.C., area who is about to give birth to the family’s first grandchild. She is planning to move near her sisters after the baby is born. Mr. F’s son is the youngest, and still lives at home, attending Suffolk Community College. He, too, sees Syracuse in his future.

Nonetheless, Mr. F has no plans to follow the family north after retirement, even though his money would go much further in Syracuse than Long Island. “I would consider moving off Long Island only under duress,” he says. “I like living here. It’s still a bit rural where I am. I like walking out of my house in the morning and seeing the trees and hearing the birds.” The family house in Kings Park abuts Sunken Meadow State Park. “I can walk down to the boardwalk,” Mr. F says.

“I don’t see us leaving Long Island,” Mr. F says. “For that matter, I don’t see myself retiring. I can’t afford to,” he says, pointing proudly to an 82-year-old woman he shares office space with in his job. “Nothing says you have to retire.”

Nonetheless, most Baby Boomer’s will, including the nearly one million living on Long Island, and if they stay here, they will likely force Long Island to become more retirement friendly.