Reading to Prep for Retirement

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Seeking Answers

Most of the readily available advice about retirement concerns preparing financially for retirement. Without a doubt that is important, but it's not the only part of a successful retirement.  I knew that for me the biggest part would be whether I could be happy without the structure of work.  Although I loved summer vacation and Christmas holidays, could I be happy in an open ended vacation that didn't have the work of the holidays?

During a conversation about his recent retirement, my husband's brother-in-law, Marc suggested a book that helped him organize his time and health in retirement.  It's a book that has little about the finances of retirement but a lot about putting life into retirement and determining what will constitute your retirement.  Because after the traveling what will you do with all of the hours in a day?  HOW TO RETIRE HAPPY, WILD, AND FREE, by best-selling author Ernie J. Zelinksi  addressed the concerns that I had about retirement and helped me develop answers to my own questions.  I am sure there are other great books out there that do the same thing, but after reading this one and doing some of the exercises in it I had enough confidence to trust in myself that I would be able to live a life I wanted to live without a career as a cornerstone.

Zilinksi has a different attitude about working than I have so that was something I had to wrap my mind around to accept and not be sidetracked by when I was reading. He is also the author of The Joy of Not Working and semi-retired happily quite young which worked for him.   I have never thought of work as something that you want to be free from as soon as possible. He gives examples of how some people choose to live in order not to need to work at a paying job that seems to me to be a mind boggling choice of a life of poverty or of extreme frugality.  I would never want to have be so focused on getting away from work that I made myself miserable while I was working.  That's sort of the warning.  However, if you would like to retire as soon as possible this may be the very book that will help you realize that you can find a way to make that happen.

There are parts of the book that certainly helped me put the image of the life I wanted to lead in retirement into focus.  There are good exercises to try to prepare for retirement, particularly the Plant Your Get-a-Life Tree and Watch It Grow and Grow, that is part of a chapter entitled, So Many Worlds, So Much to Do.  That chapter had me thinking and realizing that there was so much I wanted to do that there were probably not enough hours in the day or time in my clock to get it all done.

It is an easy, folksy read with cute cartoons and plenty of words of wisdom from various wise people in blurbs along the way.  He writes a very convincing image of retirement and gives varied and extensive lists of suggestions for defining your life.

My biggest nugget from the book: you don't retire from something but you retire to something and that to something is personal and can be ever changing.