Postretirement activity plans: The role of opportunity structure, partner support, and perception of time

Retirement is a major life course transition for which some people plan more than others. As planning positively affects retirement adjustment, it is important to investigate the heterogeneity in retirement planning and its antecedents. While financial preparation has been studied thoroughly, little is known about the activities older workers plan to do in retirement. We hypothesize that postretirement activity plans can be categorized into three types: transformative leisure, bridge employment, and interpersonal leisure. Moreover, we expect that these plans are affected by people’s opportunities, time perception, and partner support for these activities. We use data from the first wave of the NIDI Pension Panel Study (NPPS) to test these hypotheses. The NPPS consists of a sample of about 6,800 Dutch older workers who were asked about their plans to engage in 14 different activities upon retirement. Where relevant, partners of older workers were also surveyed, which provided multi-actor data for these couples (N = 4,409). Our results support the classification into three types of postretirement activity plans. Multivariate analyses show that the type of postretirement activities that older workers plan for is related to the opportunity structure facilitating continuity (e.g. number of pre-retirement leisure activities, number of social roles), support of the partner for engaging in these activities, and older workers perception of time (future time perspective and subjective life expectancy). Practically, our findings can help to identify older workers who might face a more difficult retirement transition, because they plan less for the psychosocial aspects of retirement