Transcripts

Mike Carruthers:
When you hear the phrase "planning for retirement" you probably think about financial planning, but there's another issue and that's planning what in the world you're going to do in retirement.

Alan Bernstein:
Most people spend between 60-70% of their day thinking about their career - now if you dropped them out of their career, in effect they lose 60-70% of their identity.

Alan Bernstein, co-author of the book Your Retirement Your Way, says that's exactly what happens when people retire.

You've basically created a whole spectrum of people, 77 million in the next ten years, who are suddenly released from all the structures that have given them identity and a sense of purpose. And they don't know how to create that for themselves - they're kind of left to drift. And what you're dealing with now is a population that didn't exist twenty years ago, in other words we would have people twenty years ago who looked at retirement as a short-term process. You know, 65-70 or 72 - now we're looking at 65-85, 65-90.

So it's never too early to start asking yourself questions like…

"What thoughts have you given to planning your transition to retirement, what do you feel you want to accomplish in retirement?" Because we've found that the clearer you are in thinking about retirement as something purposeful for you and that you want to in effect achieve, the more likely it is that you're going to feel purposeful in your life.

You can take the retirement readiness quiz on Alan's website which you can link to from ours: somethingyoushouldknow.net - I'm Mike Carruthers and that's Something You Should Know.