Marika Stone - Too Young to Retire: 101 Ways to Start the Rest of Your Life

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Table of Contents

Quotes TK

This book is dedicated to our children and grandchildren, the ageless adventurers of the future.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to the many ageless adventurers who contributed their stories to www.2young2retire.com, The Web Site of Retirement Alternatives, and to this work. Without their encouragement, generosity, and willingness to share details of their journey into the uncharted and as yet unnamed post-career phase of life (formerly known as retirement), we might not have been inspired and challenged to look beyond the status quo.

We also wish to express gratitude to our editor, Julia Hough, whose fine-tuning, sensitivity to the subject, and generosity of spirit were invaluable, and to our designer, Joan Harmon, whose Big Eye is equaled by her big heart.

Introduction

The rest of your life is uncharted territory, full of twists, switch-backs, surprises, and bumps. Not so different from life so far, come to think of it. Retirement, the longed-for goal of a previous generation, is irrelevant for you, the inhabitant of a new century, with differentand evolvingmodels for work, play, relationships, and a meaningful life. The truth is, retirement is a social experiment that has outlived its promise, if it ever fulfilled it in the first place. When Social Security was created in 1935, few lived long enough to enjoy their so-called golden age.

You can expect not only to live longer than previous generations (a bonus of twenty or thirty years according to the latest research), but to enjoy good health for more of those years. You can look ahead to choices inconceivable to your parents and grandparentsopportunities they could barely dream of. The one-size-fits-all formulas that served as retirement planning in their day are inadequate in ours. Life is too long for a single-minded pursuit of safety and material comforts.

Consider this book an off-the-road map to the rest of your life. It is about discovery, surprise, and blazing your own trail. It isnt about destinations; its about the journey itself. We will introduce you to other adventurers who are living the rest of their lives their way. These adventurers have demolished the stereotypes of what it meant to be fifty, sixty, or even ninety, doing what they could, with what they had, right where they were, as Theodore Roosevelt advised. Use this book to let yourself wander... and wonder.

The Story of Us

What made us, a preretiree couple with two incomes, a steadily appreciating home, children gone, and last pet dearly departed, opt out of a Sunbelt retirement? Why have we launched a Web site advocating the same for others?

The short answer:

Youve heard of a near-death experiencethe tunnel, the glowing light, the deceased loved ones, and then wham! You wake up at the accident scene and nothing about your life will ever be the same. Ours was a near-fatal brush with retirement, from which we awoke with an unexpected mission to share what we learned.

The longer answer:

About a dozen years ago, we attended a National Association of Food Equipment Manufacturers seminar in Palm Springs, California. Howard, then fifty-five, was founder/publisher of an annual directory for the food-service industry, the perfect grace note to a long career in advertising sales. Marika, forty-nine, was along for the ride, taking an R&R break from her work as a freelance business writer.

To so-called retirement planners, we must have seemed the perfect candidates for their services. Our two incomes supported a pleasant lifestyle and with college bills easing, we had begun to save and invest a larger percentage of our income. Retirement was in the back of our minds, like a dull headache, except occasionally in the middle of the night, Marikafinancial newsletter junkie that she waswould startle awake with the thought, Omigod! We dont have nearly enough money saved to generate the 70 percent of our current income all the experts told us was required for a comfortable existence. Discovering Palm Springs calmed those middle-of-the-night panic attacks. Rattling around in our five-bedroom New Jersey home, we had already given some thought to downsizing. Housing in California was affordable; in fact, local real estate values were perhaps at their lowest point in decades. The desert climate was ideal for a couple that loved the outdoors. We estimated that, with a little catch-up effort, our savings and investments would be more than enough to finance a comfortable retirement.

The universe must have been eavesdropping because a direct-sale opportunity came our way less than six months later, and we acted on it. An adobe condo with glorious mountain views, nearby pool, tennis courts, and hiking trails became our second home, a place for long winter breaks, a test-drive of the retirement life we imagined we wanted. After all, didnt everyone?

But a funny thing happened on the way to our golden years. The more we experienced the lifestyle and community, the less certain we were that our decision was the right one for us. Over the course of ten winters, we spent at least six and sometimes as many as ten weeks at a time in Palm Springs, setting up temporary shop there. Nearby LAX enabled Howard to make frequent business trips to Asia and elsewhere. A computer, printer, and fax were all Marika needed to serve her clients, including some she never met face to face.

But if anything troubled our sleep, it was the prospect of our second, getaway home turning into a permanent residence. Could we idle away the hours making small talk, puttering around the garden, decorating or redecorating our condo, and waiting for visits from our (yet unborn) grandchildren to break the tedium of a life that was without direction or purpose? Could we, with our thousands of hours between us in personal-development workshops, settle for that? Much of what we noticed about retirement called to mind Dave Barrys quip about the fine line between hobbies and mental illness. We also began to see the correlation between too much time on your hands and obsessive concerns about money, possessions, and failing health.

Had this been a work of fiction, you might have expected an earthshaking Hell no, we wont go! but real life isnt usually like that. So, what eventually led us to conclude that, as was once said of New York City, retirement was a great place to visit, but who in their right mind would want to live there? In the quiet of many a Palm Springs evening, we found the time to read, think, and talk about where we were and where we appeared to be headed. We were absorbing stacks of material on retirement and aging issues, noticing to our dismay the persistent view of retirement as an entitlement, something one earned and inevitable for everyone. To judge from most of this, the only questions worth considering were when you were ready and how you would pay for a life of leisure.

There were some dissenting voices, too. These include Betty Friedans The Fountain of Age (1993) and Theodore Roszaks America the Wise: The Longevity Revolution and the True Wealth of Nations (1998), both by authors in late middle age, and prime examples of the New People, Roszaks term for members of a new, yet to be named movement of the most adventurous, assertive, astute senior generation we have known. We were also stirred by Marc Freedmans

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