Items related to How to Make Your Money Last: The Indispensable Retirement...
Turn your retirement savings into a steady paycheck that will last for life with Jane Bryant Quinn’s “‘how to’ book that covers every phase of retirement finance. Bottom line, anyone on the retirement track or in retirement should own this book” (Huffington Post).
Today, people worry that they’re going to run out of money in their older age. That won’t happen if you use a few tricks for squeezing higher payments from your assets—from your Social Security account (find the hidden values there), pension (monthly income or lump sum?), home equity (sell and invest the proceeds or take a reverse mortgage?), savings (should you buy a lifetime annuity?), and retirement accounts (how to invest and—critically—how much to withdraw from your savings each year?). The right moves will not only raise the amount you have to spend, they’ll stretch out your money over many more years. With this book, financial expert Jane Bryant Quinn, “America’s dean of personal finance” (Forbes), explains how to turn your retirement funds into a paycheck that will last for life.
She also shows how to look at your savings and investments in a new way. If you stick with super-safe choices the money might not last. You need safe money to help pay the bills in your early retirement years. But to ensure that you’ll still have spending money ten and twenty years from now, you have to invest for growth, today. Quinn shows you how. At a time when people are living longer, yet retiring with a smaller pot of savings than they’d hoped for, this book will become the essential guide—“a hugely valuable resource for readers, wherever they are on their personal financial timeline” (Publishers Weekly, starred review).
Today, people worry that they’re going to run out of money in their older age. That won’t happen if you use a few tricks for squeezing higher payments from your assets—from your Social Security account (find the hidden values there), pension (monthly income or lump sum?), home equity (sell and invest the proceeds or take a reverse mortgage?), savings (should you buy a lifetime annuity?), and retirement accounts (how to invest and—critically—how much to withdraw from your savings each year?). The right moves will not only raise the amount you have to spend, they’ll stretch out your money over many more years. With this book, financial expert Jane Bryant Quinn, “America’s dean of personal finance” (Forbes), explains how to turn your retirement funds into a paycheck that will last for life.
She also shows how to look at your savings and investments in a new way. If you stick with super-safe choices the money might not last. You need safe money to help pay the bills in your early retirement years. But to ensure that you’ll still have spending money ten and twenty years from now, you have to invest for growth, today. Quinn shows you how. At a time when people are living longer, yet retiring with a smaller pot of savings than they’d hoped for, this book will become the essential guide—“a hugely valuable resource for readers, wherever they are on their personal financial timeline” (Publishers Weekly, starred review).
"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
About the Author:
Jane Bryant Quinn is a leading commentator on personal finance. She is author of the bestselling Making the Most of Your Money NOW, Smart and Simple Financial Strategies for Busy People, and Everyone’s Money Book. Quinn has written for Newsweek, The Washington Post, Bloomberg, Woman’s Day, and Good Housekeeping. An Emmy Award winner, Quinn’s own program ran on PBS. She has also been a regular correspondent for the CBS Morning and Evening News. Her personal finance column currently appears in the AARP Bulletin. She lives in New York City and blogs at JaneBryantQuinn.com.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:
How to Make Your Money Last 1
The Joy and Challenge of Life After Work
Now that you can do whatever you want, what do you want to do?
Retirement challenges us like nothing else. We have to reinvent our lives. One day we’re part of the vast American workforce—living by the clock, attacking new projects, and focusing our minds and skills. The next day we can sleep until noon if it pleases us. Then we bound out of bed, free at last, ready for coffee and lunch and . . . what?
Successful retirement—whenever it occurs—turns out to be work of another kind. The future is almost as blank a slate as it was when you were 18 and wondering what was going to happen to you. Fifty years later, you’re fortified with knowledge and experience but with no place to take it. You might have a partner in life, children, grandchildren, status in your community, and a dog that loves you. Still, you have seven days a week and 52 weeks a year to fill. No sane human being can watch that much television or play that much golf. Maybe you’ll be able to stay at work well past normal retirement age. Even so, you might shorten your hours. The last day of work can’t be held off forever. You need an action plan to transition into this new phase of your life.
You also need a financial plan to make the most of the income and savings that you have available. That’s what most of this book is about. “Money can’t buy happiness,” they say, but it sure can buy food, shelter, heat, phone service, streaming movies on TV, and gas for the car. A little extra buys plane tickets, ball games, concerts, and long-term peace of mind. It’s hard to be happy if you’re always worried about the bills. Learning how to stretch your available income and rightsize your life are the first steps toward retiring well. Even if retirement seems far away, steps you take now—to save and invest—can greatly improve your standard of living when your paycheck eventually stops.
But before I talk money, I’d like to talk about the nonfinancial challenges of life after full-time work. They’re huge and, for most people, unexpected. We fling ourselves into leisure as if a grand vacation lay ahead. But permanent vacations can get pretty boring. When we were working, we had a sense of accomplishment and a place in the world, even if—at the end—we couldn’t wait to quit. Now, having shut that door, we need another place. What are we retiring to?
Eventually, when you look back on your transition from work to retirement, you’ll think of it as perhaps the most creative period of your life. Most of us still need an active sense of social worth. But instead of getting it from a workplace, ready-made, we have to make it ourselves. The challenge is to discover new interests, new places, and new friends. Your weeks should fill up again with projects, meetings, entertainments, and events—activities you chose yourself, to gladden your days and give purpose to your life. You’ll probably take on these projects at a leisurely pace. I’m not suggesting that you’ll want to be busy all the time. But neither will you want to look at a daily calendar that’s blank.
It takes time to move from the worker role to the role of engaged, individual citizen. How long the transition takes will depend on your personal initiative and will. The faster you can bury the old “workplace you” and rise to a new “liberated you,” the more content you’re going to be.
Not everyone moves into retirement willingly. You might lose your job and spend some unhappy weeks or months rehashing that stressful time. Your health (or your spouse’s health) might be dicey, which, for now, completely occupies your mind. The departure from work might have been so sudden that you had no time to prepare emotionally.
Widows, widowers, and the divorced face similar problems. They’ve been forcibly “retired” from married life and now face their own blank slate.
No matter how you get there, you (and your partner, if you have one) will have to figure out how to build another life. The questions will be the same for everyone.
Who are you, anyway?
For so much of our lives, we identify ourselves with our jobs. “I’m a lawyer.” “I’m a teacher.” “I’m an operations manager.” “I work for IBM.” Those who have young children might also say “I’m a mother” or “I’m a father.” Our jobs and family responsibilities give us status and meaning. When we quit, or the children grow up, there’s an instant loss of status that few of us are truly prepared for. We’re in a new role—that of citizen-retiree. It’s an empty vessel until we fill it up.
What are you going to do with the rest of your life?
A 3G retirement (golf, gossip, and grandchildren) isn’t always enough, cute as the grandchildren are. Most retirees today are vigorous, mentally alert, and eager to jump into something active and interesting. We have skills, smarts, and dreams. At work, we were accomplishing stuff, even if we got tired of it. As parents, we had the critical job of raising responsible adults. But what are we accomplishing now? Loss of meaning and purpose throws some retirees into depression, even those who thought they couldn’t wait to start a leisured life. If you spend your hours in front of a TV set, you’re likely to—quite literally—bore yourself to death. You’ll need all your imagination and energy to discover a new role.
Where will you find friends?
When you worked, you made social contact simply by doing your job every day. You had people to chat with or complain about, customers to call on, and lunches with colleagues. When your job ends, however, your workaday friends are likely to fall away. You need to get out of the house and do things, not just for fun and intellectual interest but for the social companionship, too. Women are better at this than men but it can be a challenge for both.
THE FIVE STAGES OF RETIREMENT
The gerontology researcher Robert Atchley studied the transition from working life to leisure. Retirement, he says, is a process, not an event. Some people hustle through the stages. Others take months, even years, to reach serenity. The better you manage the first stage, the faster your progress is likely to be.
Stage 1: Preretirement. You gradually disengage from work. You’re still doing your job but your imagination moves ahead. You talk with friends about their own plans for life after work and ask retired friends what they’re up to now. You put together a budget to see if, and when, you can afford to leave your paycheck behind. If you’re married, you have many talks with your spouse about how you each expect retirement to work—your hopes and fears, where you’ll live, what you’ll do with your time, whether you’ll both retire at the same time and, if not, what the expectations will be. You think about what you might do next. If you hope for part-time work, now’s the time to start making the contacts. There might be a project you can do for your current employer or others in your business. If you’re being laid off, do your best to think about your next life, not your past one. You’re not “unemployed” (bad place), you’re “semiretired” (better place). Forward is your only choice.
Stage 2: The Honeymoon. You’re free! No more deadlines or office stress. You’ll do some of the things you’ve been meaning to get to—clean the closets, paint the porch, take a trip. If you already have a lot of interests, you might step up your engagement with them. If you’ve led a high-pressure work life, you might simply rest with your feet up, read, go fishing, take walks, or watch ball games. Assuming that your retirement was planned, you’re happy, happy, happy with your decision. Your honeymoon can last for many months, provided that you’re moving quickly toward your other interests. But it might last only a week or two if you have nothing to do and nowhere to go.
Stage 3: Disenchantment. Gradually, your days come to seem a little bit empty. You feel a loss of status, if you identified strongly with your job. To the younger, working world, you’re obsolete. Even if you retired gladly, your new activities might not be as fulfilling as you’d hoped. You see fewer people and feel more isolated, especially if your spouse or partner is still working. You might notice that money is going out the door faster than you planned.
If you retired specifically to do something else, such as starting a business or taking up teaching, you might skip Stage 3 or pass through it pretty quickly. Ditto if you’re an outgoing person who loves discovering new things. If not, disenchantment might catch you by surprise and slow down your adjustment. You’re not so eager to get out of bed and can’t figure out how to spend your afternoons. You join a club or half try to volunteer for a local organization but it doesn’t work out. If your health is poor you might come to feel that your life is effectively over. You’re just taking up space. For some, Stage 3 might last a year or more while you obsess over what you “used to be.”
Stage 4: Reorientation. It dawns on you how bored (and boring) you’ve become. Emotionally, you’re finally ready to advance. Some retirees will go back to work. For the rest, it’s like retiring all over again but with a more realistic eye. You take stock of your income and expenses and rightsize your life financially. You evaluate your experiments with activities so far and start to engage more deeply with the one that interests you the most. One is all you need; others will come along. Your lingering work-life persona is finally being put to bed. You feel yourself growing into your new role.
Stage 5: Stability. You’ve got it together. You’re finding new purpose and feeling productive again. You’re happy (or at least satisfied) with your life and are living within your means. Along with new interests, you’ve discovered ordinary pleasures, such as browsing in a library or taking walks. Some retirees get to this stage pretty quickly—in fact, directly from the honeymoon. Others take years. You’ll know you’ve arrived when all your thoughts are forward-looking and your days are full.
MAKE YOUR PLAN: IT’S LIBERATING!
The transition from work to “freedom” is harder than most of us realize until we get there. It starts with clearing the old stuff out of your head—your work, routines, and expectations of status. They get in the way of your life ahead. Post work, you can do anything that’s within your budget and physical capabilities.
When your calendar is blank and you’re wondering how to fill it, it seems natural to start a list.
You might begin by asking yourself what makes you happy—not only today but what made you happy in the past. It might be something you haven’t done for 30 years. Never mind. Write it down. You’re trying to capture anything—specific activities, experiences, relationships—that once put a smile on your face.
From there, branch out to everything you’ve ever thought of doing. No idea is trivial. Maybe you’d like to improve your tennis or golf. Read all of Charles Dickens. Research your family’s roots. Get a puppy and train it. Learn woodworking. Take cooking classes. Take dance classes. Join a singing group (or start one). Join a weight-loss group or exercise class. Learn photography, including the art of editing photos digitally. Teach Sunday school. Take music lessons, maybe on an instrument you used to play before you got so busy. Join a bridge group. Join a chess club. Give parties. Learn another language. Walk a long mountain trail. Learn local history. Run for local office or join a political campaign team. Start a website to share your professional expertise. Join an investment club. Get more involved with your church or temple. Start a local newsletter. Coach sandlot baseball. Make pots. Paint (President George W. Bush started painting lessons when he left office). Volunteer for a worthy cause. Start (or join) a protest group. Tie flies for people who fish. Create gardens for yourself and your friends. Become a local tour guide or docent in a regional museum. Make beautiful holiday and birthday cards. Learn computer skills. Sign up for Skype so you can talk to your children and grandchildren long distance, free. Run a charity fund drive. Make jewelry. Become a discount coupon maven. Join a yoga class. Sort the family photos and put them online. Attend local concerts and lectures. Write your autobiography. Have regular dinners with friends. Spend quality time with your spouse or children. Join AmeriCorps, for civic opportunities. Teach English as a second language. Start a wine-tasting group. Try out for a local amateur theater production or offer to paint scenery. Find a bird-watching pal. Travel—be it cruises, visits to children, group tours, or day trips to interesting places near your home. Restore furniture or an old car. Manage garage sales for neighbors. Etcetera, etcetera, and so forth, as the king of Siam would say.
You might enjoy going back to school. Some retirees work toward college or advanced degrees, others audit courses. A school near you might offer extension courses to adults (check Road Scholar’s Lifetime Learning Institute for opportunities). Free or low-fee college courses are available online: Scroll through the offerings at edX.org, Coursera.org, Udemy.com, and Udacity.com as well as the online courses from Harvard, Dartmouth, Yale, Duke, the University of California, Berkeley, and others (for a long list of what is available, go to MOOC-list.com). Some courses are live; they require you to be at your computer at certain hours and to complete assignments (although not necessarily submit to tests). Others let you listen to lectures whenever you want.
Finally, make a list of your skills. Are you good with your hands or with computers? Do you know finance? Can you organize groups? Create marketing campaigns? Work well with children? You have a lot to offer your community that it can use. A focus on skills can help direct you to volunteer groups that would be thrilled to have you. Business people might join a local SCORE (Service Corps of Retired Executives), an organization that helps small businesses get started or expand. Financial people might assist a nonprofit with its books, investments, and fund drives, or study to be a financial planner with an emphasis on retirement prep. Those who drive a mean hammer might volunteer with a local Habitat for Humanity. If you’re good with people, you might become a health or social service aide. A skills list helps you assess job prospects, too.
You might not find your next life’s work immediately—a delay that risks dumping you, grumpily, into the depressive Stage 3. But keep trying things out. One of them will click.
To get yourself moving, set up an engagement calendar—one of those month-at-a-glance hanging calendars or the calendar on your computer. Put something useful or interesting into your schedule every day. It might be work around the house (clean the closets, repair the screens), ordinary errands (shopping, doctor’s appointments), community activities (club meetings, volunteer days), hobbies (consult your “makes me happy” list), or personal enrichment (reading, study). You might undertake weekly mini-explorations of nearby towns—to visit a new park, a small museum, a used-book store. It takes as little as one activity, plus normal chores, to structure your day. Something you have to do (or want to do) gets you up in the morning.
Regular activities also have the virtue of bringin...
The Joy and Challenge of Life After Work
Now that you can do whatever you want, what do you want to do?
Retirement challenges us like nothing else. We have to reinvent our lives. One day we’re part of the vast American workforce—living by the clock, attacking new projects, and focusing our minds and skills. The next day we can sleep until noon if it pleases us. Then we bound out of bed, free at last, ready for coffee and lunch and . . . what?
Successful retirement—whenever it occurs—turns out to be work of another kind. The future is almost as blank a slate as it was when you were 18 and wondering what was going to happen to you. Fifty years later, you’re fortified with knowledge and experience but with no place to take it. You might have a partner in life, children, grandchildren, status in your community, and a dog that loves you. Still, you have seven days a week and 52 weeks a year to fill. No sane human being can watch that much television or play that much golf. Maybe you’ll be able to stay at work well past normal retirement age. Even so, you might shorten your hours. The last day of work can’t be held off forever. You need an action plan to transition into this new phase of your life.
You also need a financial plan to make the most of the income and savings that you have available. That’s what most of this book is about. “Money can’t buy happiness,” they say, but it sure can buy food, shelter, heat, phone service, streaming movies on TV, and gas for the car. A little extra buys plane tickets, ball games, concerts, and long-term peace of mind. It’s hard to be happy if you’re always worried about the bills. Learning how to stretch your available income and rightsize your life are the first steps toward retiring well. Even if retirement seems far away, steps you take now—to save and invest—can greatly improve your standard of living when your paycheck eventually stops.
But before I talk money, I’d like to talk about the nonfinancial challenges of life after full-time work. They’re huge and, for most people, unexpected. We fling ourselves into leisure as if a grand vacation lay ahead. But permanent vacations can get pretty boring. When we were working, we had a sense of accomplishment and a place in the world, even if—at the end—we couldn’t wait to quit. Now, having shut that door, we need another place. What are we retiring to?
Eventually, when you look back on your transition from work to retirement, you’ll think of it as perhaps the most creative period of your life. Most of us still need an active sense of social worth. But instead of getting it from a workplace, ready-made, we have to make it ourselves. The challenge is to discover new interests, new places, and new friends. Your weeks should fill up again with projects, meetings, entertainments, and events—activities you chose yourself, to gladden your days and give purpose to your life. You’ll probably take on these projects at a leisurely pace. I’m not suggesting that you’ll want to be busy all the time. But neither will you want to look at a daily calendar that’s blank.
It takes time to move from the worker role to the role of engaged, individual citizen. How long the transition takes will depend on your personal initiative and will. The faster you can bury the old “workplace you” and rise to a new “liberated you,” the more content you’re going to be.
Not everyone moves into retirement willingly. You might lose your job and spend some unhappy weeks or months rehashing that stressful time. Your health (or your spouse’s health) might be dicey, which, for now, completely occupies your mind. The departure from work might have been so sudden that you had no time to prepare emotionally.
Widows, widowers, and the divorced face similar problems. They’ve been forcibly “retired” from married life and now face their own blank slate.
No matter how you get there, you (and your partner, if you have one) will have to figure out how to build another life. The questions will be the same for everyone.
Who are you, anyway?
For so much of our lives, we identify ourselves with our jobs. “I’m a lawyer.” “I’m a teacher.” “I’m an operations manager.” “I work for IBM.” Those who have young children might also say “I’m a mother” or “I’m a father.” Our jobs and family responsibilities give us status and meaning. When we quit, or the children grow up, there’s an instant loss of status that few of us are truly prepared for. We’re in a new role—that of citizen-retiree. It’s an empty vessel until we fill it up.
What are you going to do with the rest of your life?
A 3G retirement (golf, gossip, and grandchildren) isn’t always enough, cute as the grandchildren are. Most retirees today are vigorous, mentally alert, and eager to jump into something active and interesting. We have skills, smarts, and dreams. At work, we were accomplishing stuff, even if we got tired of it. As parents, we had the critical job of raising responsible adults. But what are we accomplishing now? Loss of meaning and purpose throws some retirees into depression, even those who thought they couldn’t wait to start a leisured life. If you spend your hours in front of a TV set, you’re likely to—quite literally—bore yourself to death. You’ll need all your imagination and energy to discover a new role.
Where will you find friends?
When you worked, you made social contact simply by doing your job every day. You had people to chat with or complain about, customers to call on, and lunches with colleagues. When your job ends, however, your workaday friends are likely to fall away. You need to get out of the house and do things, not just for fun and intellectual interest but for the social companionship, too. Women are better at this than men but it can be a challenge for both.
THE FIVE STAGES OF RETIREMENT
The gerontology researcher Robert Atchley studied the transition from working life to leisure. Retirement, he says, is a process, not an event. Some people hustle through the stages. Others take months, even years, to reach serenity. The better you manage the first stage, the faster your progress is likely to be.
Stage 1: Preretirement. You gradually disengage from work. You’re still doing your job but your imagination moves ahead. You talk with friends about their own plans for life after work and ask retired friends what they’re up to now. You put together a budget to see if, and when, you can afford to leave your paycheck behind. If you’re married, you have many talks with your spouse about how you each expect retirement to work—your hopes and fears, where you’ll live, what you’ll do with your time, whether you’ll both retire at the same time and, if not, what the expectations will be. You think about what you might do next. If you hope for part-time work, now’s the time to start making the contacts. There might be a project you can do for your current employer or others in your business. If you’re being laid off, do your best to think about your next life, not your past one. You’re not “unemployed” (bad place), you’re “semiretired” (better place). Forward is your only choice.
Stage 2: The Honeymoon. You’re free! No more deadlines or office stress. You’ll do some of the things you’ve been meaning to get to—clean the closets, paint the porch, take a trip. If you already have a lot of interests, you might step up your engagement with them. If you’ve led a high-pressure work life, you might simply rest with your feet up, read, go fishing, take walks, or watch ball games. Assuming that your retirement was planned, you’re happy, happy, happy with your decision. Your honeymoon can last for many months, provided that you’re moving quickly toward your other interests. But it might last only a week or two if you have nothing to do and nowhere to go.
Stage 3: Disenchantment. Gradually, your days come to seem a little bit empty. You feel a loss of status, if you identified strongly with your job. To the younger, working world, you’re obsolete. Even if you retired gladly, your new activities might not be as fulfilling as you’d hoped. You see fewer people and feel more isolated, especially if your spouse or partner is still working. You might notice that money is going out the door faster than you planned.
If you retired specifically to do something else, such as starting a business or taking up teaching, you might skip Stage 3 or pass through it pretty quickly. Ditto if you’re an outgoing person who loves discovering new things. If not, disenchantment might catch you by surprise and slow down your adjustment. You’re not so eager to get out of bed and can’t figure out how to spend your afternoons. You join a club or half try to volunteer for a local organization but it doesn’t work out. If your health is poor you might come to feel that your life is effectively over. You’re just taking up space. For some, Stage 3 might last a year or more while you obsess over what you “used to be.”
Stage 4: Reorientation. It dawns on you how bored (and boring) you’ve become. Emotionally, you’re finally ready to advance. Some retirees will go back to work. For the rest, it’s like retiring all over again but with a more realistic eye. You take stock of your income and expenses and rightsize your life financially. You evaluate your experiments with activities so far and start to engage more deeply with the one that interests you the most. One is all you need; others will come along. Your lingering work-life persona is finally being put to bed. You feel yourself growing into your new role.
Stage 5: Stability. You’ve got it together. You’re finding new purpose and feeling productive again. You’re happy (or at least satisfied) with your life and are living within your means. Along with new interests, you’ve discovered ordinary pleasures, such as browsing in a library or taking walks. Some retirees get to this stage pretty quickly—in fact, directly from the honeymoon. Others take years. You’ll know you’ve arrived when all your thoughts are forward-looking and your days are full.
MAKE YOUR PLAN: IT’S LIBERATING!
The transition from work to “freedom” is harder than most of us realize until we get there. It starts with clearing the old stuff out of your head—your work, routines, and expectations of status. They get in the way of your life ahead. Post work, you can do anything that’s within your budget and physical capabilities.
When your calendar is blank and you’re wondering how to fill it, it seems natural to start a list.
You might begin by asking yourself what makes you happy—not only today but what made you happy in the past. It might be something you haven’t done for 30 years. Never mind. Write it down. You’re trying to capture anything—specific activities, experiences, relationships—that once put a smile on your face.
From there, branch out to everything you’ve ever thought of doing. No idea is trivial. Maybe you’d like to improve your tennis or golf. Read all of Charles Dickens. Research your family’s roots. Get a puppy and train it. Learn woodworking. Take cooking classes. Take dance classes. Join a singing group (or start one). Join a weight-loss group or exercise class. Learn photography, including the art of editing photos digitally. Teach Sunday school. Take music lessons, maybe on an instrument you used to play before you got so busy. Join a bridge group. Join a chess club. Give parties. Learn another language. Walk a long mountain trail. Learn local history. Run for local office or join a political campaign team. Start a website to share your professional expertise. Join an investment club. Get more involved with your church or temple. Start a local newsletter. Coach sandlot baseball. Make pots. Paint (President George W. Bush started painting lessons when he left office). Volunteer for a worthy cause. Start (or join) a protest group. Tie flies for people who fish. Create gardens for yourself and your friends. Become a local tour guide or docent in a regional museum. Make beautiful holiday and birthday cards. Learn computer skills. Sign up for Skype so you can talk to your children and grandchildren long distance, free. Run a charity fund drive. Make jewelry. Become a discount coupon maven. Join a yoga class. Sort the family photos and put them online. Attend local concerts and lectures. Write your autobiography. Have regular dinners with friends. Spend quality time with your spouse or children. Join AmeriCorps, for civic opportunities. Teach English as a second language. Start a wine-tasting group. Try out for a local amateur theater production or offer to paint scenery. Find a bird-watching pal. Travel—be it cruises, visits to children, group tours, or day trips to interesting places near your home. Restore furniture or an old car. Manage garage sales for neighbors. Etcetera, etcetera, and so forth, as the king of Siam would say.
You might enjoy going back to school. Some retirees work toward college or advanced degrees, others audit courses. A school near you might offer extension courses to adults (check Road Scholar’s Lifetime Learning Institute for opportunities). Free or low-fee college courses are available online: Scroll through the offerings at edX.org, Coursera.org, Udemy.com, and Udacity.com as well as the online courses from Harvard, Dartmouth, Yale, Duke, the University of California, Berkeley, and others (for a long list of what is available, go to MOOC-list.com). Some courses are live; they require you to be at your computer at certain hours and to complete assignments (although not necessarily submit to tests). Others let you listen to lectures whenever you want.
Finally, make a list of your skills. Are you good with your hands or with computers? Do you know finance? Can you organize groups? Create marketing campaigns? Work well with children? You have a lot to offer your community that it can use. A focus on skills can help direct you to volunteer groups that would be thrilled to have you. Business people might join a local SCORE (Service Corps of Retired Executives), an organization that helps small businesses get started or expand. Financial people might assist a nonprofit with its books, investments, and fund drives, or study to be a financial planner with an emphasis on retirement prep. Those who drive a mean hammer might volunteer with a local Habitat for Humanity. If you’re good with people, you might become a health or social service aide. A skills list helps you assess job prospects, too.
You might not find your next life’s work immediately—a delay that risks dumping you, grumpily, into the depressive Stage 3. But keep trying things out. One of them will click.
To get yourself moving, set up an engagement calendar—one of those month-at-a-glance hanging calendars or the calendar on your computer. Put something useful or interesting into your schedule every day. It might be work around the house (clean the closets, repair the screens), ordinary errands (shopping, doctor’s appointments), community activities (club meetings, volunteer days), hobbies (consult your “makes me happy” list), or personal enrichment (reading, study). You might undertake weekly mini-explorations of nearby towns—to visit a new park, a small museum, a used-book store. It takes as little as one activity, plus normal chores, to structure your day. Something you have to do (or want to do) gets you up in the morning.
Regular activities also have the virtue of bringin...
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- PublisherSimon & Schuster
- Publication date2017
- ISBN 10 1476743770
- ISBN 13 9781476743776
- BindingPaperback
- Number of pages384
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How to Make Your Money Last: The Indispensable Retirement Guide
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