Design Your Retirement Before It Designs You
I was walking through London a while back when I came across a sign that stopped me in my tracks. Its message was simple: “Don’t slow down for the wrong reasons.” I stood there longer than was probably acceptable for someone standing on the pavement staring at a sign. But it landed. Because it said in a few words what...
I want to tell you about a conversation I had with a woman I’ll call Claire. Claire was 54 and had been thinking about making changes to her life for a few years. She knew what she wanted – more space, more purpose, a health routine that didn’t rely entirely on good intentions and optimism, a clearer sense of what...
Picture this. It’s a Sunday afternoon sometime in the 1990s. Your dad is in his armchair – newspaper, cup of tea, television on in the background. He’s worked the same job for 30 years. He has a pension. He knows exactly what retirement looks like because everyone around him retired the same way. He’ll be fine. Now, picture yourself. You’re...
Let me ask you something, and I ask you to sit with it for a second. Is there something you’ve been meaning to start – really start – for months? Maybe longer? Something that matters to you, that you know MATTERS to you, and yet somehow keeps getting pushed to the next week, the next season, the next version of...
Let me be clear: I’m not here to shame you. I’m here to wake you up. ๐ Because here’s the truth about Gen X and retirement readiness: most of us are sleepwalking into the next 20-30 years of our lives. We’re on autopilot, doing the same things we’ve always done, vaguely aware that retirement is approaching but not really dealing...
I need to tell you something personal. Something that drives everything I do. It’s about my parents. The Slow Decline My parents are in their late 70s. They spend their days in front of the TV – usually angry at the news. Their main social interactions are with the grocery delivery person and the caregiver who checks on them twice...
Last month, I found myself in a small expat community in Thailand – one of those places where Westerners go to retire, stretch their pension dollars, and live out their golden years under the sun. I wasn’t there to retire. I was there to observe. To learn. To catch a glimpse of what life might look like for me in...