Planning for the Second Half of Retirement<\/a><\/p>\nEC: Point two?<\/p>\n
KD: There’s so much about life at this age that’s confusing. And I don’t mean a little bit confusing, I mean utterly confusing. If you gave me $1 million in cash and asked me to explain Medicare, I couldn\u2019t do it\u2014and I’m Mr. Age Wave! There\u2019s Part A, Part B, donut holes, Medicare Advantage, Medicare and Medicaid. For the first seven or eight years, I\u2019d get a Medicare statement that said, \u201cYour Medicare Bill.\u201d Then, on the upper right, it said, \u201cThis is not a Bill.\u201d What is it?<\/p>\n
And it\u2019s not just Medicare. It\u2019s all the documents from insurance companies and financial firms, the complexity of taxes, and the ever-growing threat of elder scams. I’m a somewhat clever guy, I’ve been in the field for 52 years, and I\u2019m fortunate to still have great cognitive health, but it’s all utterly confusing and impossible to understand. People over 65 generally are ashamed to admit that they are confused and don\u2019t understand this stuff, but I’m okay admitting it. And what about people for whom English is a second language, or people who didn’t have white-collar jobs, or people who were not used to reading 10-page legal documents? I can’t imagine how they make sense of it all.<\/p>\n
KD: Point three: Gravity. It seems there’s more of it around than when I was younger. Now, it’s harder to move around and do things. I\u2019ve got aches and pains I never had before. My wife and I were in Rome last year, and I looked at the Spanish Steps and thought, \u201cMaybe I\u2019ll skip those.\u201d Even though I work out every day and eat a very healthy diet, being in the physical world is harder. And I imagine that people who are overweight, have arthritis or have battled cancer really feel it. We haven’t set the world up so it\u2019s easy to maneuver.\u00a0<\/p>\n
KD: Point four is about purpose. When I was in my youthful or middle years, I was taken seriously\u2014or not\u2014based on what I was producing and what I was performing. Now, I go into a lot of situations where the assumption is that I\u2019m going to be less; that I\u2019ve lost some of my intelligence or talent. I see it in the questions I get asked and in the way people look at me or leave me out of the conversation. That\u2019s part of the collateral damage that seems to come with retirement\u2014people assume you are less able and less effective after a 65th birthday.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The last thing I want to say, and this might surprise you, has to do with role models. I look around, and I don\u2019t see many or any role models anymore.<\/p>\n
EC: For younger people or for you?<\/p>\n
KD: Younger people may assume that I’m a role model for them, or maybe a \u201cmentor,\u201d a word that has become very popular in the last decade. But who do I have? There don\u2019t seem to be many people my age or older who I admire and respect and can get some tips from as to how to do aging better. The opposite. I think this is a time when older men are not showing up in a responsible or impressive way, and there are many older men who I don’t want to be like.<\/p>\n
Let me go sideways for a minute. In the United States alone, 80 million people are over the age of 60, and we think they\u2019re supposed to be on vacation rather than doing purposeful things. But I have found that the majority of people who are retired are not enjoying themselves. Since we have the greatest concentration of knowledge, wisdom and experience in the history of the world, I would argue that we need to put those resources to use by having older people help to teach in our schools, help in our churches and synagogues and mosques, and help in advocating for young people who are going through a really rough time right now in terms of mental health.\u00a0<\/p>\n
We created the Peace Corps 70 years ago. Today, I think we need an Elder Corps, where millions of older people can rise up and be the elders in their communities. As boomers, we need to do more and be more; be leaders and contributors versus just being retired. For retirees and society as a whole, our current \u201cretirement\u201d model is wrong.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
Comments, observations, suggestions? Please email [email\u00a0protected]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Decades before the study of retirement became the \u201cthing\u201d it is today, a 24-year-old Ken Dychtwald turned his…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":652624,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[84,4176,4174,4175,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-652623","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-personal-finance","tag-business","tag-finance","tag-personal-finance","tag-personalfinance","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/652623","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=652623"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/652623\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/652624"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=652623"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=652623"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=652623"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}