The Third Journey: Making the Most of Your Life After Work

Copyright © 2017 William R. Storie and Robin W. Trimingham.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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ISBN: 978-1-5320-1328-7 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5320-1329-4 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-5320-1327-0 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017901723

iUniverse rev. date: 04/05/2017

For everyone

CONTENTS

Foreword

Preface

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Your First Year

Chapter 1: The First Year of Your New Life

Welcome to the Roller Coaster

Considering Your Options

Unraveling the Mess

Developing a New Purpose

Establishing a Routine

Psychological Aspects of Retirement

Chapter 2: The Influence of Psychomotivation

The Big Myth

Reality Sets In

Clearing Your First Hurdle

Getting Going

Chapter 3: Factors Affecting Longevity

Longevity

Health

Self-Health Care

The Will to Live

Finding Your Balance

Chapter 4: Overcoming the Fear of Change

Resisting Change

Holding Yourself Back

Fear of Fear Is the Only Fear

Choosing to Change

The Price of Change

Family Challenges

Chapter 5: Managing the Hard and Soft Impacts of the Aging Process

Health

Chronic Illness

Geriatric Conditions

Money

Mortality

Other Things to Think About

Surviving Loss

Dating in the Third Journey

Ancillary Factors

Social Services

Health Considerations

Chapter 6: The Importance of Taking Control of Your Health

A Holistic Approach to Wellness

Putting the Health Picture Together

Calculating Your Fitness Age

Calculating Your Heart Age

Calculating Your Body Mass Index

Embracing the Health Care Revolution

Chapter 7: The Interrelationship between Diet, Exercise, and Psychomotivation

The Importance of Proper Nutrition

The Fitness Roller Coaster

The Relationship between Diet and Obesity

The Benefits of Staying Active

Psychomotivation and Health

Money Matters

Chapter 8: The Psychological Consequences of Poor Financial Planning

Retirement Spending Patterns

Understanding Your Finances

Overcoming Barriers

You May Experience the Following

Psychological Effects of Money Problems

Chapter 9: The Components of Your Preretirement Plan

Turning the Dream into Reality

Company Pensions

Government Pensions

Investment Income

Home Equity

Working in Retirement

Expenses

Discretionary Spending

Preparing a Budget

Keeping the Boat Afloat

Final Words on the Budget

Chapter 10: Managing Your Finances in Retirement

Frugal Is the New You

All Expenses Considered

Should You Downsize?

What’s on Your Bucket List?

Supplementing Your Income

Keeping on Track

Managing a Surplus

Tightening Your Belt

Refinancing

Summing Up

Estate Planning

Chapter 11: Peace of Mind as You Age

The Sandwich Generation

A Voice from the Past

Making Your Wishes Known

Medical Directive

Do Not Resuscitate (DNR)

Power of Attorney

Making a Will

Inheritance Issues

Elder Abuse

Quality of Life

Chapter 12: Managing Long-Term Relationships

The Albatross at the Breakfast Table

Emotionalism Rules the Day

Time Together and Time Apart

The Romantic Side of Things

Enjoying Time Together

Caregiving

When the Walls Come Tumbling Down

Rebuilding Your Life

Other Relationships

Chapter 13: Overcoming Loneliness in the Third Journey

Finding Yourself Alone

The Effects of Loneliness

Symptoms of Loneliness

Making Changes to Your Situation

Chapter 14: The Function of Self-Regeneration

Untying the Knots

Looking Back, Living Forward

The Power of Self-Belief

Building Your Self-Fulfillment

Ready, Steady, Go

Chapter 15: Making Final Preparations for Your Journey

Reaching a New Self-Awareness

Finalizing Your Plan

Life Is Not a Rehearsal

Maintaining a Positive Attitude

Being True to Yourself

Appendix A: The Economy Will Go Boom

Prologue to Appendix A

The Economic Power of the Olderhood Generation

Health Care

Travel and Leisure

Real Estate

The Money Business

Consumer Products

The Food Industry

Spending Power

Appendix B: Forming a Local Chapter of the Olderhood International Club

Glossary for Your Third Journey

FOREWORD

Bill Storie and Robin Trimingham have done something quite unique. They have written a book about retirement that is practical, engaging, at times funny, and hard to put down. The critical issues of financial and physical health, relationships, the effect of change, legal concerns, and discovering the passions and pursuits that fill one’s time productively are dealt with in a way that sets The Third Journey apart.

Most of us are both excited and a bit afraid of what may happen during Olderhood, the name the authors give this exciting and challenging stage of life. Blending facts, possibilities, options, and true life stories to make a point come alive, this is the guide you need to help you enter this phase of life with confidence.

Bill and Robin have built an Internet presence that has followers in all corners of the globe through Olderhood.com’s website and Facebook presence. They added a way for retirees to exchange ideas and concerns with each other through a growing network of virtual and in-person clubs.

Now, The Third Journey brings all of their collective experience and solid advice to your home. It is truly a road map to your future.

Bob Lowry

Author of Living a Satisfying Retirement and Building a Satisfying Retirement

PREFACE

Begin at the beginning, the King said, very gravely, and go on till you come to the end: then stop.

—Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

Once upon a time in the far-off land of Bermuda, a bank manager named Bill was discussing his impending retirement with a friend. He confessed that while he had all his financial ducks in a row, he was hesitant to accept a lucrative early retirement package because he had no idea what he was going to do with all his free time. He knew that he wanted to set up an office and continue consulting and also pursue his passion to write, but he was not sure if this would be sufficient to fill his day.

To forestall having to commit himself to anything in particular, he busied himself with renting office space downtown, finding suitable furnishings, and setting up shop.

For a brief while he zipped from one pasta-and-cappuccino lunch to the next, exploring the possibilities. He quickly realized that a spate of mundane business analysis would never satisfy his newly liberated psyche, for his soul was craving an adventure—a wild foray into uncharted waters.

As he cast about for some way to satisfy this yearning, he suddenly had an idea—he would create a blog and write about his struggles to transition from the work world to something more fulfilling. In a moment of recklessness, he mentioned this to his longtime business colleague, Robin, who replied, Brilliant idea! There’s just one tiny problem, isn’t there? You don’t actually know how to start a blog, do you?

No idea.

Not a problem; I do. So what are we going to call it?

This required quite a bit of thought because the hardest part of naming something these days is not coming up with a name but coming up with a name that is still available for purchase as a dot-com. Many brilliant possibilities surfaced, but regrettably they were already claimed by someone else. For the better part of a week, the working title was actually Gentleman Geezers, simply because it was available. Thankfully, common sense prevailed on the basis that neither one of the authors is a geezer, nor was the phrase likely to attract many female readers.

In fact, the more we thought about it, the more we realized that there just did not seem to be a suitable word for what we wanted to write about. The more we considered the meaning of words like senior, golden-ager, elder, and retiree, the more we realized that all these words had been assigned negative connotations of infirmity, frailty, and diminished mental capacity. This, we agreed, was not what we wanted to write about at all.

The more we hunted through the thesaurus, the more we realized that what we wanted was a word that did not exist—a word that conveyed life and energy and opportunity and vitality as it pertained to an older person. And then it dawned on us—if we wanted to discuss an entirely new kind of life for postretirement adulthood, we were going to have to start by defining exactly what this life entailed and then create a vocabulary to describe it. That was a watershed moment for us that changed the course of the entire project.

The tricky thing is that all the good words are taken, said Robin.

They can’t be, said Bill.

They are.

Then where does that leave us?

Trying to come up with a new word for ‘old,’ I think.

"Hell no—I’m not old! I’m just older!" said Bill emphatically.

After weighing the merits of just about every word combination we could think of, we eventually named the blog Olderhood, our idea being that one transitions from childhood (your first life journey), through adulthood (your second life journey) to eventually arrive at a postretirement phase of life, which we termed Olderhood.

The Third Journey, therefore, is your passage through this third phase of life.

Before we embarked on this project, we would have said that retirement life was a time of creaky knees, conserving resources, and mending fences. We also assumed that although there were retired people all over the world, retirement concerns would vary greatly, depending upon ethnic, social, cultural, financial, and geographic considerations. We embarked on this project as a hobby, and we did hope that some people would be interested in what we had to say, but we never really thought that our voice would reach beyond North America.

Much to our amazement, we were completely wrong.

We launched www.olderhood.com in May 2013 and quickly discovered that retirement concerns cut horizontally through all levels of society in every country in the world. Everyone is concerned about health, finances, aging, keeping busy, maintaining their independence, and how to make a productive contribution to society.

In August of that year we also started a Facebook page (www.facebook.com/Olderhoodcom) as a companion to the blog and immediately found that people in locations around the world were desperate for lighthearted but accurate information on these six common concerns and a safe forum in which to share their experiences and seek advice. In less than six months we had followers from the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, France, Australia, New Zealand, India, the Philippines, and Malaysia.

The multicultural appeal that two people from Bermuda, a tiny country in the second most isolated community on the planet, had achieved was both astonishing and humbling. On New Year’s Day 2014, we celebrated the addition of our fifteen thousandth Facebook fan,¹ as we endeavored to comprehend that perhaps we had found our mission—a mission so simple and yet so vast it would take the rest of our lives to fulfill: to create a road map for a new postretirement lifestyle that anyone can follow.

As daunting and impossible as this initially seemed, it was equally clear that we would have no shortage of help because our readers were not shy about telling us what they liked and wanted, and they enthusiastically encouraged their friends and family to write to us as well. Most surprising of all was that these people were willing to stand up and share their thoughts and feelings and emotions publicly online.

Given the diverse time zones in which our Facebook followers reside, we soon discovered that we were actually operating a twenty-four-hour business. It might have been three o’clock in the morning on our island, but it was three in the afternoon in central Manila, and every member of our expanding Philippine community wanted to chat with us and with each other.

To accommodate the nonstop activity, we decided to open a special group so that our most active members in Asia and India would have a place to convene and entertain each other while we got a little sleep. Although we were not certain whether anyone would like this idea, we named this Facebook group the Olderhood International Club (OIC) and ran a couple of notices on our main Facebook page to let people know how they could join. Our first member, a resident of Malaysia, joined in less than four minutes and promptly signed up all of his friends and relatives. Within a month there were well over one hundred regulars chatting and sharing information around the clock, and the more we listened to them and interacted with them, the more we learned.

A great number of our new friends proved to be highly educated retired professionals who are interested in natural remedies, sharing recipes, humor, wisdom, and battling loneliness and are willing to help each other with everything from advice regarding how to fill out pension forms to praying for the recovery of a loved one. Far from whining about failing health and sorry circumstances all day long, these people help each other up when they are down and have a huge appetite for friendship, fellowship, and humor.

They are also anything but shy, and they have offered their opinions, their perspectives, and their hearts to us on every step of this journey; many of the ideas that we have developed in this book were germinated as a result of our interactions with them. They have enthusiastically liked the material that resonated with them and kept politely silent on things that did not. They helped us cut a new path for everyone to follow. We gratefully acknowledge these wonderful people from all corners of the globe and recognize their support.

In our efforts to develop original, quality content for our online audience, we tested most of our potential material on the OIC group. They heard our first podcast, watched our first video blog, completed surveys, and downloaded e-books. They offered comments on hundreds of original inspirational quotes, phrases, and terms, some of which you will find in this book.

We were just starting to get the hang of all this when something completely unanticipated happened—our Philippine OIC members suddenly decided that they wanted to form a proper club and hold face-to-face gatherings. Today, there are several OIC clubs in the Philippines that meet regularly and even go on group vacations. (See Appendix A for information on starting a local chapter of the Olderhood International Club in your area.)

Obviously, we now had no shortage of data regarding the interests, needs, and preferences of English-speaking people over the age of fifty. The more we analyzed the trends buried among our most popular posts, the more we began to realize that this third phase of life is not actually about retirement at all.

The third phase of life is about challenging traditional boundaries, conquering old fears, staying positive, and finding a meaningful purpose to carry you through the rest of your life.

At first we didn’t realize that we had actually identified a universal gap in human understanding, but the further we went, the more it became obvious that we were compiling information that everyone seemed to need. As we struggled to maintain control of this ever-expanding project, it eventually became clear that we should write a book, and the idea for The Third Journey was born.

The objective of The Third Journey is to help you develop and maintain a thriving new lifestyle, once the work years are behind you. It is a compilation of the thoughts and life experiences of both the authors, combined with research from a wide variety of accredited sources and insights contributed from many of our blog readers. It explores the origins of retirement, popular misconceptions about growing older, and the traditional impacts of the aging process, and it offers some new ideas for the third phase of your life.

We hope this book becomes the guidebook that you refer to time and again as your retirement life progresses.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The authors would like to acknowledge Bob Lowry and Dr. Bob Ritzema for their support and encouragement during the writing of this book and the members of the Olderhood International Club around the world, without whom this book would not exist.

INTRODUCTION

You are never too old to set another goal or to dream a new dream.

—C. S. Lewis

As much as advances in science, medicine, and technology have made it possible for large numbers of people to live longer in better health than ever before, no one really considered how extended longevity would affect the human experience as a whole. Even though there is now some awareness of the extent to which living longer will impact all sectors of society, the majority of people still believe that we will just be living in a world with a top-heavy load of old people sitting on the porch, consuming more than their fair share of social services because their pensions are insufficient to support them for an extended period of time.

But this does not have to be the case for the baby boomer generation (1946–1964) who began exiting the workforce in 2012. The baby boomers are the first generation to pass through the retirement threshold in large numbers with sufficient health, wealth, energy, and technology to experience the Third Journey en masse.

Unfortunately, the baby boomers are almost entirely unprepared to make this journey and will suffer greatly unless they are brave enough to seize the opportunity to experience a life that their parents never dreamed of. The challenge for this generation is that they are not satisfied to sit back and simply be senior citizens; regrettably, they were not actually raised to become anything else. Their parents and grandparents taught them to look forward to spending a few dwindling years watching the sun set and doing very little, and when they were younger, this seemed like a grand plan.

No one told them that they would be stronger than expected, need more financial awareness than expected, be more challenged to keep pace with advances in technology than expected, and be more likely to live longer than expected. No one told them that they would still have unemployed children living at home or that they would be the unpaid babysitters and taxi service of their grandchildren. No one told them that they would have to help pave the way for future generations to enjoy a rewarding postwork life at the same time that they are struggling to create one for themselves.

Today, despite the fact that many countries are starting to increase the minimum retirement age again, there is no doubt that many people will live at least twenty to thirty years in the postwork phase of their lives.

While some individuals remain self-directed throughout their lives and always know what to do when they find themselves in unfamiliar territory, many experience unexpected challenges in the Third Journey. What ought to be a relaxing, happy time can frequently prove to be an overwhelming, stressful time, when things that were once taken for granted—such as chasing after children, vacuuming the house, or making household repairs—now somehow seem exhausting or boring.

They want to do something more fulfilling but have little idea what to do or how to go about figuring this out. They still