What Color is Your Parachute? For Retirement by Richard N. Bolles and E Nelson (Ten Speed Press, $39.99)
KEY POINTS:
If retirement is a dirty word for you, you can adopt Richard Bolles' colourful prose and instead call it "the fourth movement in the symphony of our lives".
That is indeed waxing lyrical as he does in the introduction to this retirement planning handbook, where he talks about making beautiful music with you, the reader.
Bolles teams with American retirement planning consultant John Nelson to help readers work out how to successfully negotiate retirement years.
The book is aimed at those who feel retirement is rapidly creeping up on them. Its framework aims to ensure retirement will be enjoyable, not a stage of life spent worrying about whether you can afford to pay the bills.
Nelson and Bolles advocate that the ideal retirement is one you create, rather than just taking what comes. Nelson says this planning goes beyond financial planning. Sure that's important but so is health as we live longer and we want to be happy, too, or what's the point in living so long?
Each chapter focuses on a key element of retirement, drawn from six scientific fields of knowledge: prosperity is the intersection of finance and geography; health is supported by biology and medicine; happiness is built on the foundation of psychology and sociology.
There is a delightful chapter on "retirement hogwash" which cuts through the persuasive and subliminal messages and advertising promoted by retirement industry marketers.
Be brave, get off the well-worn, outdated approach to retirement, say Bolles and Nelson. Step outside the square and customise retirement to fit the life you want to live. Indeed, if you have a calling you love, you need never retire.
Acronyms, analogies and illustrations abound; financial security pillars are PERKS (Personal savings, Employer plans, Real estate, Keep working and Social security); life-planning is an exercise in VIPs (your Values, Identity and Priorities). A wobbly three-legged stool shows how the financial components (superannuation, savings and work or private schemes) of retirement are out of kilter.
Progress has brought choice, but also complication to retirement. Plus it is likely we will underestimate how much dosh we need for retirement and how long we will be retired. We are living longer, but ill health and redundancies force a lot of people into early retirement. Add the cost of health care as you age and retirement starts to seem an expensive, luxury. Time to bite the bullet and calculate how much you will need and how you're going to achieve that with the book's "homework" in the form of exercises and worksheets.
Money sorted (or not), the book then offers tips for managing relationships and health.
Nelson and Bolles write in a chatty, humorous style. Some of the book is specific to the American market but the big picture it generates is universal. The book offers no easy fix: if you want to enjoy retirement, you have to put in the hard yards now. Maybe KiwiSaver is just what our nation of spenders needs to enjoy the twilight years.
