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Crisis? What Crisis?
Older readers will remember a classic TV series from the early 1960s, The Twilight Zone. In one memorable episode, a gangster dies and finds inexplicably that he ends up in heaven. The life he lived on Earth resumes, except now he gets all the women he wants without trying, wins every time he plays the slots, sinks every ball when he plays pool, and so on. You get the picture. He is delighted at first, but after a few days of this he becomes totally bored and goes back to the angel who welcomed him to the afterlife. He tells the angel he doesn't think he belongs in heaven; maybe he would be better off in the “other place.” The angel responds with a diabolical laugh and says this is the other place.
The same warning applies to retirement. It might be the easy life we think we yearn for, or we might find it is the other place. Being freed of work obligations after 40 or more years of employment can create the same gleeful anticipation we used to feel on the last day of school before summer vacation but, then again, it might bore us literally to death. The primary retirement concern for most of us, though, is financial in nature. Without a substantial inflation-protected pension, retirement itself may consist of endless financial anxiety, limited resources, and shattered dreams. To avoid this, we may delay retirement for years and even over-save to ensure this scenario does not come to pass.
The point of this book is to give the reader enough information to ...
