Hey, what's wrong with retirement? Everyday, some financial professional is flogging you to save
and plan and get ready.

``I thought it was just an oddball thing,'' Arthur Mark, 75, said, when he started to question the idea of a long, leisurely period of recreation, bopping around with the grandkids or pursuing one's hobbies.

It turns out, that feeling isn't odd. As Howard and Marika Stone, part-time residents of Palm Beach Gardens, have found out.

The Stones have collected dozens of stories of people who, for lack of a better word, un-retired.

Not because they needed more income. But because people are living longer and healthier lives, the Stones say, they're looking for a new purpose beyond the traditional retirement model. For example, Doug Harmon, 59, spent more than half his life as a systems engineer for Citibank, Paine Webber, IBM, JP Morgan and Merrill Lynch.

Harmon, of Weehawken, N.J., saved his money and retired three years ago.

``Then my daughter started this business. All of a sudden she got an order and it looked to her that she needed some organization. What she was doing was selling out of the back of her car,'' he told me.

``That call saved my life. We have been having the greatest time building this company together.''

Un-retirement was easy for Mark, a friendly college professor emeritus who lives in Providence, R.I.

``When I reached retirement age, to everybody's horror, I decided to do theater.''

He did become an actor - which was his dream as a young adult - and in a newer interest, he's turned into an activist on the subject of urban renewal.

In June, he is chairing a symposium at the Rhode Island School of Design about community revitalization.

You can read about these folks and others at www.2young2retire.com, the website Howard Stone, who retired from business publishing, and Marika, once an English teacher and public relations professional, established.

They've crafted a book Too Young to Retire: 101 Ways to Start the Rest of Your Life out of their collection of stories. They publish a newsletter and put on seminars. They are setting up book discussion groups around the country. The agenda is to promote renewal and regeneration through lifetime learning or meaningful work or community service.

And one day, the Stones may try to offer financial and other services to the 50-and-over crowd.

``All this started when we realized we were really uncomfortable because we had a close encounter with a gated community (where they had planned to retire in California),'' Howard Stone said. ``They were wonderful people, but they didn't seem to have a spark. They weren't looking forward to making something out of their lives. They were living in the rear view mirror.''

``We started to question whether you really have to retire at all,'' Marika Stone said.

To be sure, plenty of people don't have that luxury.

Increasingly, workers will be forced to fund their own retirement because fewer and fewer employers offer traditional pensions. But many people are not stepping up to that challenge.

Four out of 10 workers are not saving for retirement. And more than half of all workers have less than $25,000 in retirement savings, according to the Retirement Confidence Survey released by the Employee Benefit Research Institute.

Those who are saving, on the other hand, are starting to include what they'll do in their financial plans.

``Retirement is not some amorphous number that's not connected to anything,'' certified financial planner Deborah Wiggin of Miller, Wiggin & Associates in Fort Lauderdale.

She practices life planning, a segment of the financial planning field that focuses not so much on amassing great amounts of money but on achieving personal fulfillment.

``Retirement is a whole other lifetime that you can live,'' she said.

So when crafting a plan, she focuses on the numbers and on what the client wants to do with the money.

Among the questions she and other life planners ask to help their clients come to decisions:

* What would you do if you knew you had five or 10 years to live?

* What would you do if you had just one year to live?

* What would you regret not having done, if you had just one day left?

The point is to figure out ``What retirement means to you,'' she said.

UN-RETIREMENT RESOURCES

* Barry University's Older Adult Opportunity Center offers Retiring To A New Career, two six-week courses aimed at assessing skills and opportunities. The course is taught on the Miami Shores campus. For more information, call Kathy Lantz, executive director, 305-899-3387

* www.civicventures.org has resources on retirement, especially in its The Next Chapter initiatives around the country.