Retiring? Check our recommendations on the Best Books About Retirement.

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How can you prepare well for the transition to retirement? A retired couple chronicle their first year of retirement together in an excellent monthly column in The Wall Street Journal titled Retirement Rookies. They share the stories from Year One, with lessons learned and their observations on challenging issues we can all relate to.

Stephen Kreider Yoder is an editor on The Wall Street Journal’s enterprise desk. Karen Kreider Yoder is a retired professor and K-5 teacher. They join us from San Francisco to talk with us about their rookie year in retirement together.

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For More on Steven & Karen Kreider Yoder

For Subscribers of The Wall Street Journal, you can read the collection of all of their pieces here:

Retirement Rookies

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If your not a WSJ subscriber, check The Retirement Wisdom LinkedIn Company Page (and follow us...) for free gift access to their 10 pieces here:

Retirement Wisdom

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On Their Cross Country Tandem Bike Adventure

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 Be Intentional  About Your Retirement

Don't wait until you're asking What Now?

Get ahead of the game. Take the first step today:

Design Your New Life in Retirement – 6 sessions over 12 weeks – starts January 25th

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Podcast Episodes You May Like

An Artful Life – John P. Weiss

Where to Retire – Silvia Ascarelli

Independence Day – Steve Lopez

The Vintage Years – Dr. Francine Toder

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Wise Quotes

On Slowing Down & Savoring Time



"Savoring time and budgeting time, we both are definitely ones who budget our time. Much of that is because of the kind of work that we were doing, full-time work, managing full-time office work, as well as family and volunteering. You just have to really budget your time to make sure you can get everything done in the day or in the week. But now we have all this time on our hands, and so we're actually practicing how to savor our time. And so we often remind each other, 'No, no, no, we need to slow down.' So we take Amtrak to travel across this country instead of flying. Or we remind each other. 'Let's arrive early at an event so we can have a chance to chat with people ahead of time. Or let's spend a couple extra days with family instead of flying home quickly. Or let's drive the slow route from Kansas to Iowa, taking the back roads and not going through any major cities and going on no major highways. Let's try going the slow route.' So we're kind of practicing how to slow down and savor life. So those are some things that we're trying to do. It's hard. It's hard work."

On Identity in Retirement

Steve:



"Since kindergarten, we've had some sort of identity tied to this external determining force. But beyond that, I worked at The Wall Street Journal for 38 years and in journalism all that time, and it was such a determining force that stepping away from that left this vacuum. And in my own identity, I think we wrote in the article about how I have this notification that comes up on my phone right before 9:00 AM every Monday that reminds me to join the conference call for my group's meeting at The Wall Street Journal, and I haven't worked there for more than a year, and I somehow can't turn that off. It reminds me there's one little vestigial connection to my old identity as a journalist and the people that I worked with and the work that we did. It's hard for me to separate from that. And I look around and I'm a little envious of other retirees who seem to have switched over into a new identity, whether that be grandparents or whether that be whatever their identity is."

Karen:



"So I find that I still need a professional identity. And for 40 some years I was a teacher kindergarten through fifth grade, as well as being a teacher educator,