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ment system in France that's now in peril. Bigand lives in the countryside outside the city of Rouen in Normandy. He has a second home in Provence. He's just taken a vacation on Oleron island off the Atlantic Coast and is planning a five-week trip to Guadeloupe. "Travel is our biggest expense," he says.
• In Rochester, Minn., Elaine Case, 58, and her husband, Bill Wiktor, 61, both retired at 56 after three-decade careers at IBM. They have company pensions and will receive Social Security in a few years. They love to travel. Wiktor climbed Mount Kilimanjaro last year. They've taken a trans-Atlantic cruise and plan next year to hike Peru's Inca trail.
• "We're both enjoying our second lives immensely and with gratitude," Case says.
• A BRIEF GOLDEN AGE
• The notion of extended, leisurely retirements, like the ones Bigand, Case and Wiktor are enjoying, is relatively new. German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck established the world's first state pension system in 1889. The United States introduced Social Security in 1935.
• In the prosperous years after World War II, governments in rich countries expanded their pension systems. In addition, companies began to offer pensions that paid employees a guaranteed amount each month in retirement -- so-called defined-benefit pensions.
• It got even better in the 1980s. Many countries began to coax older employees out of the workforce to make way for the young. They did so by reducing the age employees became eligible for full government pension benefits. The age fell from 64.3 years in 1949 to 62.4 years in 1999 in the relatively wealthy countries that belong to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
• That created a new, and perhaps unrealistic, "concept of retirement as an extended period of leisure, " Mercer consultant Dreger says. "You'd take long vacations. That was the Golden Age."
• Then came the 21st century.
• UNDER SIEGE
• As the 2000s dawned, governments -- and companies -- looked at actuarial tables and birth rates and decided they couldn't afford the pensions they'd promised.
• People were living longer: The average man in 30 countries the OECD surveyed will live 19 years after retirement. That's up from 13 years in 1958, when many countries were devising their generous pension plans.
• The OECD says the average retirement age would have to reach 66 or 67, from 63 now, to "maintain control of the cost of pensions" from longer lifespans.
• Compounding the problem is that birth rates are falling just as the bulge of peo

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