The Wall Street Journal. Complete Retirement Guidebook: How to Plan It, Live It and Enjoy It (Wall Street Journal Guides) - Softcover

Buch 2 von 15: Wall Street Journal Guides

Ruffenach, Glenn; Greene, Kelly

 
9780307350992: The Wall Street Journal. Complete Retirement Guidebook: How to Plan It, Live It and Enjoy It (Wall Street Journal Guides)
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0307350991 ISBN 13: 9780307350992
Verlag: Crown, 2007

Inhaltsangabe

As you think about retirement, you’ve got facts to face, planning to do, decisions to make and numbers to crunch. With the experts at The Wall Street Journal to guide you, you’ll learn how to tailor a financial plan for the lifestyle you want.

• Answers your biggest question—How big does my nest egg need to be?—by linking it to your particular hopes for how you want to spend your days in retirement
• Shows how to translate your dreams and interests into daily activities, whether traveling, opening a business, volunteering or going back to school
• Provides a timeline for decisions to make and steps to take ten years, five years and one year before you retire
• Offers tips on investing wisely and working with the right financial adviser
• Tells you how to maximize your benefits from Social Security and Medicare
• Guides you through the intricacies of 401(k)s, IRAs, annuities and other financial tools and resources

Today, the average person can expect to spend two decades in retirement—why leave it to chance? For all of its changes and challenges, a well-planned retirement could very well be the best part of your life.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

GLENN RUFFENACH developed and now edits “Encore,” The Wall Street Journal’s bimonthly guide to retirement planning and living.

KELLY GREENE has covered retirement planning since 2001 as a staff reporter at The Wall Street Journal, where she works for “Encore” and writes a weekly retirement column.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

CHAPTER 1


How Do I Want to Spend My Time in Retirement? 


It’s one of the biggest mistakes that people make in the years approaching retirement: failing to consider how they wish to spend their time in later life. Yes, we all need a good-sized nest egg once we leave work, but when it comes to time and retirement, most people give almost no thought to what an average day might look like. One reason, of course, is that retirement seems . . . easy, welcoming. (What can be so tough about not working?) There’s also the assumption that leisure activities will be just as fulfilling, if not more so, than work—a dangerous assumption for people who have enjoyed their careers. It’s not that people can’t see themselves in retirement. If you ask almost anyone what he or she plans to do in his or her sixties and beyond, the answers invariably involve some mix of travel, play and work.

Specifics, though, are few and far between. As it turns out, vague answers to the question, “What will I do for twenty or thirty years?” can be just as debilitating as vague financial goals.
The best way to begin shaping your life in retirement is to look upon retiring itself as a process, not an event. With a dream, some planning and a bit of luck, your retirement might resemble that of Pam and Larry Satek.


Pam had recently retired as principal of a Chicago-area elementary school, and Larry was a few months away from retiring from his job as a research chemist. The couple—both in their late fifties at the time—had opened a winery in Fremont, a small town in the northeast corner of Indiana.


In the early 1990s, about ten years before the couple planned to retire, they began talking about what their future might look like. Rest and relaxation didn’t hold much appeal. “Neither one of us is a sit-down-and-do-nothing type of person,” Larry told us. A shared interest in wines seemed to hold some promise, but how could they turn that interest into a second career? To find the answer, the Sateks started educating themselves about the wine business. They took courses at Purdue University. They compiled articles and books. They collared experts and asked questions. (What varieties of grapes are best suited to Indiana’s soil and climate? What makes a good site for a winery?) They even planted a small vineyard on a patch of family property and sold the grapes to existing wineries in the area.


Gradually, over the course of several years, a dream took shape: The Sateks would attempt to build and operate their own winery in retirement.


In June 2001, Pam and Larry opened the doors of Satek Winery. The first day, some 500 customers walked through the entrance. “It was just the two of us in the tasting room,” Pam recalled, “and neither one of us had ever worked a cash register. It was nerve-wracking.” In all, there were just three employees, including the Sateks. Production that first year totaled 1,000 cases. By the time the fifth anniversary rolled around, the winery employed fifteen people and was producing about 6,000 cases of wine annually. (You can read about the very real fruits of the Sateks’ labors at www.satekwinery.com.)


Looking back to when he and Pam began talking about their hopes for retirement, Larry Satek recalled that the important thing was simply to set out. “We told ourselves, ‘If we don’t start doing this, it will always be a dream.’ ”


If the Sateks’ story sounds encouraging, consider that your retirement—at least initially—is more likely to resemble that of Terry Culp.


Terry was just fifty-two years old when he received an offer he couldn’t refuse to sell his five manufacturing businesses in Buffalo, New York. He and his wife climbed into their sport-utility vehicle and moved to an exclusive retirement community in Las Vegas, where he proceeded to golf himself silly. Eighteen months later, he was frustrated and bored.


“There was too much missing—including a sense of me,” Terry told us. “A huge piece of my life was totally gone. I realized that going cold turkey [from work] . . . was having a much bigger psychological impact on me than I had ever imagined.”


His decision “was totally impromptu.” “We had a great opportunity to sell the companies, it made good business sense, and we simply said, ‘Maybe it’s time to try retirement.’ I spent absolutely no time really planning for it.”


Terry eventually returned to full-time work, joining—much to his delight—a program at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, that provides technical assistance to small manufacturing, mining and construction businesses. Looking back, however, he offered a blunt assessment of how he jumped into retirement: “I give myself a ‘D’—at best.”


We’ve found that the retirees who are most satisfied with their lives are the ones who thought and talked about their hopes for the future—typically, several years before retirement itself—and then took specific actions to move closer to those goals. The Sateks are a good example. One of the most important steps Pam and Larry took was simply to begin talking about retirement—what it might look like and how they might want to spend their time. “We took it very seriously,” Larry told us. “And it paid off.”


Others, like Alice Ahlers, take a more organic approach, remaining open to new interests (whether before or after retirement itself) that, in turn, open doors to a more meaningful life. In 1996, Alice retired from the Department of Labor and signed up to take several trips with Elderhostel, the Boston-based educational program for older learners. One trip took her to Peru, another on a barge down the Seine River through France. Wherever she went, she told us, she found herself drawn to the area’s folk art. Eventually, the experiences led to a new passion: “I wanted to be able to make beautiful things and have the skill to do it.”


To that end, Alice took fifty-three courses—some a week long, some on weekends—at the John C. Campbell Folk School in Brasstown, North Carolina, in a wide range of crafts. (She told us that she was financing her education, as well as additional trips, by keeping the books for her son’s antiques business.) At the time we spoke, she was drawing plans to turn her backyard patio into a home studio so she and her friends from the craft school, who often travel across several states to visit, would have more space for creating artwork together.


EXPANDING YOUR HORIZONS
Ronald Manheimer, executive director of the Center for Creative Retirement at the University of North Carolina in Asheville, has distilled seven questions you should consider before retiring:

1. What Is My Image of Retirement? And Is It Useful and Accurate?
Start with the basics by taking an inventory of your interests—those activities or hobbies that already occupy some of your time—and ask, Which of these deserve more of your time? If you value reading and education, perhaps you see yourself attending classes at a local college in retirement or volunteering in a reading program at an inner-city school. Do you enjoy the outdoors? The open road? If so, maybe you see yourself buying a recreational vehicle in retirement or becoming a search-and-rescue volunteer. Do you like to collect things? Perhaps retirement might involve opening an antiques shop. The first step is figuring out whether your interests will translate into daily activities. Whether the activities are doable and fulfilling is the second...

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Verlag
Crown
Erscheinungsdatum
2007
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0307350991
ISBN 13 
9780307350992
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
304
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