The Good Retirement

The money advice covers everything except your actual life. More than eleven thousand Americans turn 65 every single day, and nearly all of them were handed the same brochure: save enough, and the rest takes care of itself. Then the first unstructured Tuesday arrives. The meetings are gone, the colleagues turn out to have been friends of proximity, and the person you spent forty years becoming is suddenly off duty. The rest, it turns out, is the whole question. The Good Retirement takes the twelve most common beliefs about life after work and tests each one against published research and lived reality. One myth per chapter, dismantled with wit and evidence, then replaced with something that actually holds. No worksheets, no platitudes, no lectures about compound interest. This is the book about everything the financial planner never brings up. The twelve myths include: - Retirement is a permanent vacation (the honeymoon phase has an expiration date, and what follows it is predictable and survivable) - The money is the hard part (identity, structure, and belonging are the hard part; money is just the part somebody profits from planning) - Travel will fill the years (the bucket list is a sprint, not a life) - Your marriage will be the same, just with more lunch (researchers who study gray divorce would like a word) - Keeping busy is the answer (a full calendar is not a full life) - It is too late to start anything new (Grandma Moses, Colonel Sanders, and Laura Ingalls Wilder all beg to differ) Drawing on the Harvard Study of Adult Development, the phases-of-retirement research, Blue Zones reporting, and the psychology of purpose in later life, The Good Retirement is for anyone within five years of the last day of work, on either side of it. Whether you are counting down or already wondering why the freedom feels strange, this book will hand you the one thing the brochure never includes: a plan for an ordinary Tuesday that is worth waking up for.