How to Decide What to Do When You Retire (Retirement Planning Book 2): Thinking About Retirement, #2

By Mel Clark

Everyone who has a job dreams of the day they'll retire. They envision cross-country road trips or relaxing cruise vacations. But after they've had their fill of fun and leisure, what's left?

"How to Decide What to Do When You Retire" aims to help you fill the inevitable gaps long before you're ready to retire. This book will show you how.

The last thing you want after you've said goodbye to your career is to find yourself with no purpose, nothing to fill those empty hours. This guide will help you connect the dots. It will show you help you look at what makes you happy, what brings you the joy, and what makes sense for you and your future.

If you're ready to take charge of your retirement, buy a copy of this book today and learn how to make your retirement dreams a reality!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Clear Thinking LLC
• Release date: Jan 17, 2018
• ISBN: 9781386967033

Mel Clark

Mel Clark writes about personal finance, retirement planning, and martial arts. His blue-collar union family parents raised him and his two sisters in a wonderful environment for children. However, the family was always in debt, always making payments, and never saving. As a result, Mel feels called to share hard-won money lessons with working folks. He wants them to understand they can benefit from saving and investing. They don’t have to be rich to achieve financial independence. He and his lovely wife Linda live near Virginia’s Blue Ridge Parkway. They enjoy ballroom dancing, the occasional camping trip and a silly game called Bananagrams. Mel is graduate of the United States Military Academy at West Point and the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia.

Book preview

Introduction

You’ve gotta have a reason to get out of bed in the morning.

My Father’s retirement was nearing when he ran into a former colleague who’d retired three years earlier. They exchanged small talk and Dad, naturally, asked him how he liked retirement.

The answer was a surprise and a warning.

The colleague, let’s call him Dan since I don’t remember his real name, said, Don’t do it, Irv. Of course, my Dad asked why. Dan answered, I always loved hunting geese. I wanted to follow the migrating geese and hunt them all year around.

I could afford it, and I loved it. I’ve been following the geese for three years. It’s just not fun anymore. In fact, I’m sick of it. Now I don’t know what to do. I can't even look forward to hunting season. It’s ruined for me. Don’t do it Irv, he said. Don’t retire. It’s not worth it.

Dad took Dan’s warning to heart. Fortunately, he learned a better lesson from Dan’s plight. He didn’t avoid retirement. Instead, he thought about what he would do when he retired, seriously thought about it.

He thought about the things he liked and might like. He considered what he was physically able to do. He researched options. And, he experimented.

Dad didn’t play golf, but it was on his list. So, he took a lesson or two. He read about golf and went to the driving range to hit buckets of balls. He did the same kinds of things with bowling.

These were his finalists, except for gardening and woodworking. Gardening and woodworking were his hobbies for most of his adult life. It was obvious he'd continue them.

But he wanted some kind of active sport. He was a big baseball fan and player in his younger years. But playing baseball is a young man’s game. And watching, although he'd continue to watch, isn’t active. Hunting, too, was more of a burden than a joy. Walking up and down hills in the woods just hurt a little too much.

In the end, when he choose bowling, he jumped in with both feet. He joined several bowling leagues and convinced my Mother to join one with him.

So, he bowled, gardened and made things in his workshop. At first, he only partially retired.

He’d worked one full-time job and one part-time job since before I was old enough to ride a bicycle. When he pulled the retirement trigger, he retired from his full-time work but continued his part-time job.

There were many reasons. But the result was he continued to experiment with retirement.

His story was a retirement success. His lesson from his friend, Dan,