THE SPECIAL YEARS : 50 AND BEYOND: THE TIME OF YOUR LIFE : Routes to Retirement : <i> Different Approaches, Varying Results</i>

Retirement--some long for it, some detest the thought.

By choice or not, though, most older workers end up retiring; only 31% of Los Angeles-area residents over 55 continue to work. Nationally, only 10% keep working past age 65.

What far fewer do is plan for retirement. Studies have found that 60% to 70% of older people make no specific preparation for their retirement years.

Three-quarters of retirees depend entirely on Social Security--a system never designed to offer a complete retirement income--and the generosity of friends and relatives to support them in their old age. Only 15% of Californians ages 65 to 74 can count on the triad of income sources that financial planners term crucial to a comfortable retirement: a pension, Social Security and income-generating personal assets.

Not surprisingly, then, many older Americans worry about money. A survey by the American Assn. of Retired Persons found that “having enough money” is the biggest concern of people over 40 when they thought about retirement. More than 60% of people still working past age 63 told AARP that they did so because they “need the money.”

The most affluent--including those who planned best--are the happiest with retirement. Fully 40% of retirees, the AARP survey found, would rather be working. Income was the determining factor: Those with the least money were most disillusioned with retirement.

Visits with four Southland families suggest that those statistics are valid.

Dennis and Aggie Matthews of Anaheim have had to keep working into their late 60s--with no relief in sight--because a business downturn upset their sketchy hopes for retirement. James and Alexandra Koontz of Palos Verdes have taken the steps they expect will guarantee a secure retirement when Jim stops working in the next few years. Gerard Wright of Simi Valley could have retired comfortably at 65, but his wife Mary’s catastrophic illness instead has forced him to be looking for work at 71. Finally, William and Margaret Hall of Woodland Hills are living the good life; a lifetime of careful planning and good health, along with a generous pension, make these truly their golden years.

Planning ahead? Don’t talk to Dennis and Aggie Matthews about planning ahead.

He worked 22 years for an automatic-controls company, rising to become a sales manager and expecting to stay till he retired. But he quit in 1970 to start his own business as a manufacturers representative when it became clear that the firm was becoming uncompetitive in the industry.

Aggie Matthews invested her time and energy in civic affairs in Inglewood, not too far north of her childhood home in Wilmington, where her large Lebanese immigrant family owned a thriving grocery that supported more than one household. But after years of working on interracial-relations committees, she decided that the family had to leave Inglewood when gang members beat up their 13-year-old son, Curtis, on his way home from school.

“He came home looking like hamburger,” the gregarious, gray-haired woman recalls.

Into Dennis’ new business went all their money: his pension payment from his old employer, their savings, most of the proceeds from selling the Inglewood house, an inheritance from her mother.

Fortunately, Dennis, a University of Washington-trained engineer, was a talented salesman, and D. A. Matthews Associates prospered. In the third year, it turned a profit. A few years later, their income was in six figures. Aggie and Dennis paid for three of their four children to attend college. Life in Anaheim, in the big stucco tract house north of Disneyland, was cozy.

“Basically, we were investing our money into the business itself,” Aggie explained. “At one point, we expected it would begin to (show a) return, so we could put our money away.”

That expectation abruptly crumbled in 1980. The control manufacturer whose line constituted 75% of Dennis’ business dropped D. A. Matthews as its distributor. A lawsuit followed, and a settlement, but the Matthewses’ finances were devastated. Dennis lost hundreds of thousands of dollars in commissions. He scrambled to find new product lines to support the firm’s overhead. Aggie had to go to work as an office temporary. Their youngest child, Marian, had to depend on scholarships to finish college.

Nine years later, the Matthewses, both 67 years old, are paying off loans they took out to salvage the business. “We’re gradually nipping at them and getting them paid,” says Dennis, a gentle, balding man with silver glasses and a white-silver mustache. Aggie still is working as a temp. And Dennis works more than 40 hours a week from an office at home, trying to rebuild his firm. “The company has not built back up to where it was,” he says, “and I don’t think it will.” Their income now is about $30,000 per year. Neither harbors any thoughts of retirement; they can’t afford it.

None of which is to suggest that the Matthews look back with regret. “There’s nothing in the world that we need,” Aggie says. “We have always pulled together.”

Rather, they say, the lesson of their life is that planning is for nought. Aggie laughs at the notion. And one other lesson: Be cautious, she says over coffee and cookies, about “putting all your eggs in one basket.”

Jerry Wright has his retirement all figured out.

“I should get about $130,000 for the house--I could keep most of that,” the 71-year-old electromechanical design engineer says. “(With) Social Security and another $10,000 or $12,000 from the house money, we’d be fine.”

But Wright won’t be retiring anytime soon. In fact, he’s spending his days now at Forty Plus, the job-search agency in Los Angeles, looking for work.

Like many of his peers, Wright’s financial plans for old age have been decimated by illness. Four years ago his wife, Mary--after years of deteriorating health--suffered a series of small strokes that left her bedridden. It didn’t take long in a nursing home before their private health insurance and Medicare benefits ran out. That left Wright with a $2,000 bill to pay every month from a monthly net income of $3,000. “I’m going to lose the house,” he remembered thinking. “I can’t pay off the cars, can’t pay for the phone.”

Friends advised the Wrights to take steps to qualify for Medi-Cal--advice they took. The rules said they could keep the house and could each have a car (even though Mary cannot drive). But cash was out; each could retain only nominal liquid assets. “That meant spend down,” Wright says.

It was early 1987, and Wright had just been laid off after 11 years at Reynolds Industries in Los Angeles. So he had the $18,000 lump sum from Reynolds’ pension plan to dispose of. He paid off some old second mortgages and the note on his car. He and his wife were each left with $1,700. But now Mary’s medical expenses would be borne by the state.

Between a monthly Social Security check and the income from renting out two bedrooms of his Simi Valley house, Wright says, he is barely getting by. “I eat. I buy shoes and socks and such as I need them,” he says. “But if my car goes on the fritz, I’m going to be in a real bind.”

So he is trying to find a job. He spends three days a week at Forty Plus, getting training in the best ways to market himself, learning new ways to find job leads, sending out resumes. Is his age an obstacle? “I don’t see how it could be anything but,” Wright says.

Saving money early on might have made a difference, Wright says, “but we were never far enough ahead to do any.” Another illness decades ago--Mary was very sick after their second child’s birth--wiped out the family’s savings.

“Being hit twice in one lifetime,” he says, “is not par for the course.”

Jim Koontz was only 8 years old when his father died, but he still has the check that the railroad retirement fund sent. It’s for $1.85.

“That really was a strong message,” says Koontz, now a 62-year-old administrator for missile launch operations at the Aerospace Corp. in El Segundo.

The message? “Be conscious of your retirement requirements and needs,” he says. “It has to be part of each individual’s conscious concern almost from the time they’re conscious. And it has to be done with some independent spirit. One cannot feel and be comforted that their needs will be taken care of, either by government or their employer or their family.”

Jim and Sandy Koontz have taken that message and made it the first principle in their financial lives. “Frugal” by their own description--careful marketers, inclined to drive an extra block to save a few cents a gallon on gasoline, infrequent diners out--they have invested their savings in California real estate in anticipation of Jim’s eventual retirement.

Initially, their purchases were driven by life-style preferences. A dozen years ago, they sold their home in Inglewood--pulling out some equity and leaving pool and garden upkeep behind--and bought a condominium atop a hillside in Rancho Palos Verdes.

About the same time, they built a tile-roofed stucco house in Escondido, thinking that they someday would retire to San Diego’s sleepy North County. But frantic development in the area stripped it of appeal, and for six years the Koontzes have had the house rented out while its value has soared.

Soured on Escondido, they next built a house in Kernville, on the shores of Lake Isabella. Fans of fishing and entertaining, they figured that the rural outpost would be an ideal retirement setting.

But lately, the Koontzes have leaned toward using the Palos Verdes condo, closer to medical facilities and cultural amenities, as their retirement base. Both now in good health, they suppose that someday they will sell the other houses to pay the costs of caring for themselves in the late stages of life.

“The company retirement plan and Social Security would be very, very acceptable,” Jim explains. “But our attitude is we’re looking to our own resources, our independent investments, to satisfy our principal needs.”

Unwilling to be caught by surprise, the Koontzes’ investing has been anything but casual: “A studied project,” Jim calls it. “A very studied project,” Sandy corrects. Jim gives a lot of the credit to the Aerospace Corp. From age 55 on, the company offers employees an intensive program of pre-retirement planning--financial readiness programs, instruction in the health effects of aging, time-management counseling and more.

If their resulting plan works as intended, the Koontzes--who as a couple have no children, though Sandy has a grown son from her first marriage--expect to reap in retirement just about all they’ve sowed through decades of work and economizing.

Should anything be left at the end, “that’s more than gravy,” Jim says. “That’s pure luck. That’s bad planning on our part.”

Sit with Bill and Peggy Hall for a few minutes and listen as they paint a word-picture of their retirement home on the Gulf coast of Baja California.

“There’s nothing there,” says Bill, tan and gravel-voiced at 72. “There’s no gasoline, no vegetables, no fruit, no groceries.” Perhaps 48 American families have built homes on the beachfront south of San Felipe, but no more than four or five are there at a time, eating fresh fish and clams and shrimp scooped out of the warm Gulf waters, crossing the untouched desert in all-terrain vehicles.

The Halls spend perhaps a third of their time in Mexico. They travel to San Francisco and Palm Springs. At home in their attractive Woodland Hills split-level, Peggy, 69, busies herself with quilting while Bill attends to the endless details of an active retirement.

Theirs is the old age most Americans can only hope to enjoy--the product of a working life of loyalty, thrift, foresight and other archaic virtues.

After World War II, Bill, like his wife a Minnesota native, went to work for 3M as a salesman, a job he stuck with until his retirement 34 years later.

Despite having to raise five children, they always were savers. “We’ve been pretty conservative people,” Bill says. “We always figured a certain percentage of our income went into savings, whether it was an insurance policy, a stock-option plan, or paying off a mortgage on our house.”

It helped that Peggy worked, even before working mothers were a common phenomenon. While her younger children were still in elementary school, she was the school nurse. Later, she worked in the movie industry as a location nurse.

“We were always careful how we spent money,” Peggy says. “We had a lot of friends that were on the same income level”--Bill was making more than $40,000 annually when he retired 10 years ago--”and weren’t that careful, that who spent a lot more of their spendable money for clothes and better household furnishings than we had.” Even now, the Halls don’t buy on credit, alert to the damage that high loan and credit card interest rates can do to people on a fixed income.

The same care that went into their family budget went into the analysis of their financial preparedness for retirement. “We sat down and put it all on paper . . . --our living expenses, everyday and yearly expenses,” Bill says. “We added it all up to see where we were with what our income was going to be.”

The key to their comfort, he says, has been the good deal that 3M offers its retirees.

The company has raised his pension several times since he retired. The retiree medical plan handles all expenses beyond those covered by Medicare. The Halls get dental coverage through 3M at a nominal cost. When 3M employees got an extra day off in December to celebrate the company’s first $10-billion year in sales, Hall and other retirees received a bonus in their pension checks equivalent to one extra day’s income.

Bill Hall knows his advice sounds a bit outdated, and probably comes too late for a 40- or 50-year-old who’s beginning to think about retirement. But from this robust ex-salesman, it sounds convincing:

“Get with a good company, work hard for them and stop leaping from one to another. Live within your means. But I think you should have enough pleasure in your life. You don’t save every little penny.”