With the current financial crisis, surveys show pre-retirees are delaying retirement. A retirement on hold, however, doesn't have to mean the same old job with the same old schedule until portfolios and savings can recover. Full retirement may have to wait, but the work-life flexibility pre-retirees hope for may still be possible, along with continued financial security.

Here are five steps for near retirees to follow to develop a work life "fit" that still provides the financial benefits of work as well as increased work-life flexibility. Employers in a "do more with less" environment can benefit too.

1. Understand how flexibility helps you find your "fit" by adjusting how you work, where you work or when you work. This could mean reduce your schedule, shift your hours, telecommute, become a consultant, share a job, work fewer, longer days per week, etc.

2. Challenge your notion of "work." This is not your parents' retirement with the gold watch and the golf course. Employees over 50 need to break out of their "all or nothing" definition of what "work" entails. To see the possibilities, get past your mindset that if you are not at work Monday-Friday, in a physical space with everyone else on a set schedule, then you aren't working. Examples include:

• A former partner at a national