It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas. And there’s a reason for that. It’s almost here and you can’t avoid reminders at any shopping centre. How do you remember your Christmases as a child?
There’s a gap between what most people expect from a financial adviser and what professional financial advisers offer. And it can come in various forms. There can be a mismatch between the value of advice and what people expect to pay.
When we—my husband, Owen and I—wrote the first edition of Where To Retire In Australia, one of the questions we asked in the various places was, ‘If you moved here, could you get full or part-time work, or establish a business or a profitable hobby?’ This led to another of our books, Retire Bizzi, which has 101 case studies of people around Australia who had retired and not liked it, or who had retired but wanted to do something different.
Marjorie Shackleford tried retirement once and didn’t like it. I caught up with her when I was writing Refusing to Retire. She’s one of those people who should keep working.
My retirement adventure began five years ago when I was asked if I had an interest in writing a book about preparing for retirement. I hesitated, but was convinced by the argument that it would help me plan my own retirement—I was in my early 60s at the time.
Short answer: no! But you should have a plan that will cover you in case you live to 95. At least, that’s what Robert Powell suggests in a USA Today report. Of course, if you knew when you were going to die, planning your finances for retirement would be so much easier. But, more than 30 years out, that doesn’t happen.
There’s something quite delightful about the New Zealand hip-hop crew Hip Op-eration. Their average age is 80, but their thinking is so much younger. They came to international fame when they entered the annual hip-hop competition in Las Vegas in 2013.
Back in the late 1960s, Alan Funk bought his first banjo. It cost him $50. ‘I soon worked out why it was $50,’ he says. ‘It was the greatest heap of rubbish. It was a terrible banjo, and I thought, I could build a better one than this. So I did.’
There’s a trend among the middle-aged to focus on work and income at the expense of their personal wellbeing. It’s often done with the hope that they can work on wellbeing later—in retirement, perhaps.
There were quite a few moments when I was researching for the book Retirement Ready? when I felt I had discovered a great idea. One of them came during my interview with Flinders University’s Associate Professor Joanne Earl. She said, ‘When people ask me, “how much money do I need to retire?” I say to them, “wrong question.”’