Chapter 9

Learning from the Transitions of Others

By now I hope you are convinced that retirement—and life for that matter—isn’t a one-size-fits-all concept. In the end, you have some plans to build, some decisions to make, and some actions to take.

•You have lots of money and are only concerned about planning for the qualities of your life unrelated to financial security.

•OR you have enough to consider not working at all or only working part-time to meet your life’s day-to-day needs.

•OR you don’t have the money saved for not working and are either unlikely to stop working or will need to significantly downscale your life.

•OR you can’t imagine not working and have no desire to stop but you know for sure that, regardless, you still have planning to do because quality of life is increasingly important to you After 50.

It’s called Your Life for a reason. I’m pretty optimistic about our futures; after all, people who are paying attention and have the necessary information are likely to have higher-quality lives than those who do not. Regardless of your situation and intentions, you will need to plan and adapt as part of your high-quality After 50 life.

That’s what this book is all about.

After 50 we can begin to see ourselves eventually “transitioning” from our traditional and previous roles without exactly knowing where we’re going or what the world is going to be like. Included in those transitions will be retirement, whatever that turns out to be for each of us. We’re going to encounter moving targets and winding roads. We need plans. A key aspect of the New Normal is that we shouldn’t feel like failures if part or even most of the plan doesn’t work out, whether changes were forced upon us or we changed our minds. We need to know that success lies in our ability to adapt the plan and ourselves to match evolving reality, probability, and preferences.

What does this mean for us as great three-perspective planners and people who are living our lives through paying attention and adapting as necessary? What does this mean for those of us who, regardless of our future imaginations, have to find smart ways to live high-quality lives a day at a time?

A menu of choices is available. If your first and best choice is available and affordable, great. If not, don’t think you have failed. Most of us, over time, will begin to cobble the best pieces together into shapes that work well for us in the short run and can be modified as we go along.

The best choices you see now may be fleeting. In fact, as we get older, there is an increasing probability that our choices will be made as part of a series rather than as independent/freestanding, permanent decisions. We won’t have the satisfaction of saying to ourselves, “Phew. That’s decided forever. I won’t ever have to worry about that one again.”

That’s why you should pay attention to how other people have managed their life and retirement transition. Notice I said “pay attention,” not “follow.” There is no reason you or I should adopt without analysis or modification a strategy that worked for someone else. Imagine putting on a pair of shoes someone else had selected for himself/herself and buying the shoes because they fit and looked good on the other person.

So how do we go about getting access to important, usable information about other people’s planning and living experiences? We ask.

Think back in the book to me saying that the world is so highly networked and fast paced now that we can’t possibly know everything and everyone to whom we’ll need to be connected. When I am doing career coaching with people, I encourage them to think beyond who they know personally. If you are seeking work configured as freelance or a project or a job or any of the other emerging forms of work for pay, there is a slight possibility you could go to one of your friends and ask, “Where is such a thing?” and he or she would know. There is a MUCH greater chance that you will have to go beyond your personal network to open all the necessary doors to possibilities, opportunities, and great work/person matching. This means going to people in your own network and asking them to open their own networks in a smart and informed way.

In Chapter 4, we named the asset categories—beyond financial—that you ought to have or build and refresh. I broke those assets into four categories:

1.Tangible Assets

2.Intangible Assets

3.Current Skills

4.Current Knowledge

In the Tangible Asset category, I placed this description and example:

People to whom you are less connected and who possess skills/interests/knowledge/connections that you might need to tap into from time to time when your core network of relationships doesn’t have what you need. Note: These may be the connection of relationships that your core network already has in place but you don’t know about it.

Kirk and Debby’s son, Pete, was in the process of choosing which law school he should attend. Their friend Bill had a friend with two sons who were both about 5 years out of law school. Bill connected Pete with the two-closer to his age than Bill or his parents - law school graduates so that he could interview them about 1. what school they chose, 2. what they wish they had known in advance, 3. what came as a pleasant surprise, and 4. what they would choose if they had it all to do over again. Their experience and insight to Pete proved to be so valuable that he was able to make a clear and solid choice. All from people Pete didn’t know and to whom is now weakly connected.

Kathy, 66, was finally retired from her last full-time job: graphic artist for an advertising business. Her heart’s desire was to use her skills to help more children with their reading abilities. On a flight returning from a visit to her daughter and grandchildren, she began a conversation with a younger woman seated to her left. Kathy expressed her interest in using her graphics skills to help with children’s reading. The woman’s husband, as karma would have it, was an elementary schoolteacher. He was at home working on a reading skills-oriented book for kids. The two ladies made the connection. It didn’t result in Kathy doing illustrations for that book, but it did open a door for Kathy to a professional association of children’s authors and illustrators. This connection through a connection opened doors to all kinds of opportunities Kathy hadn’t known about and wouldn’t have discovered without her awareness of weak connections and effective networking. Most of us have key questions about retirement and life planning and living for which publications and courses, excellent though they may be, leave us with a few unanswered but vital questions. This is the point at which your capacity for lifelong learning needs to kick in. This is also the point at which you need to use your Tangible Asset and ask your close connections to open the doors to their connections for you.

There are four major advantages to you building/refreshing and using this asset very well:

1.You will get additional, important perspectives.

2.You can build a bigger or more focused base from which to move and make more informed decisions.

3.You will be given gifts of information you never thought to ask about.

4.You will have confirmation that you are far from alone in your planning and in your living.

Here is how to proceed:

1.Make sure you have done a thorough job of reviewing your assets, noting where they are sufficient and insufficient, so that you have at least the rudiments of an asset improvement plan in place. See Chapter 4.

2.Make sure your life characteristics list is complete for now (and not so long that it will sink under its own weight). See Chapter 7.

3.Make sure the short-term, mid-term, and longer-term segments of your plan are well thought out and have the amount of detail and specificity appropriate to each.

4.Decide what you are unsure about and/or how you and your plan would benefit from having a conversation with someone who is ahead of you on that road.

5.Remember the qualifications for someone with whom to speak from earlier in the book: Hint: Pick someone you respect who is perceptive, candid, and not so close to you that his or her feedback will be diluted. If you can’t think of someone, ask one of your friends for a recommendation to open the connection door for you.

6.Explain to the people you select that you are looking for insight into retirement planning. You would like to meet with selected people for one-hour maximum at a time convenient to them. You will come prepared with questions. Although they may want the questions in advance, I encourage you not to do that because it increases the likelihood of you hearing a rehearsed speech rather than a candid telling of one’s story.

7.Make the appointments. Be on time. Don’t overstay the hour. If you want to go back another time, you can do that.

8.Remember that the quality of the question drives the quality of the answer.

9.Remember that great interviews are more than getting answers to your questions. They also include enough time for the other person to tell you what he/she thinks you should know that you didn’t think to ask.

If all of this seems to be a lot of work, imagine how much work it is to back out of decisions and commitments because you failed to get enough of the right information early on. There are no guarantees, but all of this is very much an investment in your future. We titled the book How Do I Get There from Here? Planning for Retirement When the Old Rules No Longer Apply on purpose. I want you to be as successful as possible in planning, adapting, and living in times that are, to say the least, fraught with both Continuous and Discontinuous Change.

As you well know by now, it’s impossible for me to give you the five questions or the six universal steps that will make everything permanent, and riskless. On the other hand, it is possible for me to give you examples of different scenarios along with possible questions.

Bob and Sally, ages 67 and 66, both a year away from leaving their jobs, have been reading magazine articles about the best places to retire. Having lived through “enough bitter Midwest winters,” they are ready for a warmer climate. Bob and Sally originally planned to move to be near their son and his family, but he accepted two promotions in three years that involved substantial relocation. They quickly came to the conclusion that although it would be nice to be closer to their grandchildren, Bob and Sally didn’t want to keep moving to follow them, and they also worried that their son might turn down an important promotion in the dynamic tension between his career and being loyal to them.

The list of places they liked the best based on supporting articles and information included:

Phoenix, AZ, metro area

Alexandria, VA

Tucson, AZ

Prescott, AZ

Des Moines, IA

Austin, TX

Cape Coral/Ft. Myers, FL

Colorado Springs, CO

Franklin, TN

Snow and cold weather eliminated several of these possibilities. The couple began to follow social media conversations among people who had recently moved to each of the remaining locations. At a dinner, Bob and Sally discovered through a friend of her visiting sister that the sister was great friends with someone who had moved to Austin two years ago. Through their neighbor, a local realtor, they connected with a realtor in Cape Coral who in turn connected them with two couples who had just moved there. One of Bob’s customers had a branch office in Tempe, and through that connection, Bob and Sally were able to connect with three people in their own age group in the Phoenix area.

All of the people they connected with were willing to devote some time discussing their own experiences. What questions did Sally and Bob decide to ask? You’ve seen these questions earlier in the book. Now that you have several chapters under your belt, so to speak, are these the best questions for Sally and Bob to ask? What would you do to make these and other questions even smarter?

I realize you have seen some of these questions before.

1.When you originally thought of retirement, what did you imagine it to be?

2.What has it actually turned out to be?

3.What originally drew you to where you are now?

4.What did you wish you had known in advance?

5.What has come as a pleasant surprise?

6.What has been disappointing?

7.What are the primary ways that newcomers integrate themselves into the community over time?

8.If you had it to do over again, what would you do and why?

9.What advice would you give to anyone considering moving there?

10.What haven’t we asked that we should be asking about?

The answers to these questions—from people with actual, practical experience and insight—provided the informational tipping point for Bob and Sally. Of course, before they made the final commitment to move, they visited their first-choice location. By then the people they had interviewed were their new friends who in turn introduced them to their own friends. Sally and Bob have been using the techniques of learning from others’ experience ever since in a wide variety of life areas.