Why Andrea Maizes Became a Retirement Coach Instead

speaker-0 (00:06.648)
Hey everybody, welcome back. Today we have Andrea Mays. Andrea is the Chief Operating Officer and Lead Coach with Golden Age, which is a, I do believe a retirement coaching company. Andrea, welcome. It’s always best to hear people describe who they are and what they do from them, as opposed to me saying it. So tell us a little bit more about you.

speaker-1 (00:31.948)
Well, thank you, Neil. It’s great to be here. So Golden Age is a retirement coaching company. We coach really anybody, but we focus on folks that are looking to transition out of corporate life and into something else. We don’t know what the something else is initially. I came across Golden Age because I was one of the clients of the company.

So I fell in love with retirement coaching and ended up connecting with it’s a Golden Age’s owner and we partner now during our coaching. Golden Age was the brainchild of a woman by the name of Ashley Rindby. I bring her up because she’s in her mid forties. So you would think, you when I saw her picture, I’m like, wait a minute, what does she know about retirement? She’s 45 years old.

And that’s what makes her so special is that she has got an intergenerational view on the world. And so we hit it off and I started working with her and then ultimately became her COO and coach. My background is HR. I spent 40 plus years in HR, mostly in professional services and software and tech. And during COVID, I did what I would never recommend to any client ever do. And that is took a nose dive off the corporate ladder because I

was tired, I was managing 300, I’m sorry, 30,000 employees globally during COVID, it all had to be in person because of the business. So it was really very messy and I was exhausted and sold the company. I’m like, okay, I’m done. No plan, no enough. I just said, I’m done. And I promptly fell right on my face after about three months of, I don’t know.

cleaning closets, digitizing my photos, doctor’s appointments, friends, family, all of that. I woke up one day and I’m like, it’s Tuesday. What am I supposed to do with myself now? I have nothing on my calendar. I didn’t realize how ingrained my identity was with my work. And I set out on this journey. It wasn’t pleasant to figure it out. And since then, I found Ashley along the way. She helped me.

speaker-1 (02:53.474)
find a direction. And I just, guess the work that I’ve been focused on over the last couple of years was a book and it just was published. And I’m excited about that because it’s meant to be the guide that I didn’t have when I took a nosedive off the corporate ladder. So my goal is mission.

working with Ashley and the book is to help others do a better job of planning and figuring it out before they just launch themselves into the unknown.

speaker-0 (03:27.714)
So, okay, so many places to go here. So you and I had talked about when I first met with you that you wanted to talk, you like talking to people about not mistaking retirement from burnout. Tell me about a bit about that.

speaker-1 (03:49.496)
Well, it was interesting as burnout and thinking you’re ready to retire feel very much alike in the moment. You’re exhausted, you’re tired and you just, can’t feel the difference. It feels exactly the same. Well, what happens is you mistake it. If you mistake burnout for being ready to retire and actually retire, most people who think about retiring are in their mid sixties, early sixties. And so they say, okay, I’m ready to retire.

Then they move on to that. And what they find out quickly is that maybe they weren’t really ready to retire. They were maybe ready to work less or do something less. And then they try to turn around and go back into corporate life and newsflash ageism is real. And it’s very difficult for them to find an entree back in to what they were doing. And then that plunges you further into, excuse me, a depression because you realize that you potentially made a mistake. You really weren’t ready.

to jump, maybe you were ready to do less, work less, or do something different, and then you’re just sort of stuck. burnout is take a rest, take a sabbatical, take a vacation, work less, work with your employer to figure out how to recover and then move on. Ready to retire is moving towards something, not running away from something.

speaker-0 (05:14.382)
So when you, to use your term, did your nose die? Yeah. Were you burnt out or were you ready to retire?

speaker-1 (05:22.2)
I was burnt out. And probably ready to do something a little different, but not stop working all together, not like retire and go into the sunset and hang out with my grandkids. Not that I don’t like that, but I didn’t, that wasn’t my idea of my full-time life. But I didn’t know that because I’ve been doing thinking about it ahead of time.

speaker-0 (05:44.598)
Okay, so you jumped into retirement coaching.

What is retirement coaching for those that are have never heard of the term or the role or the vocation?

speaker-1 (06:01.144)
So everybody knows retirement plan, right? From a financial perspective, you know, that’s table stakes. You can’t retire if you don’t have enough money to support yourself when you are retired. So we don’t deal with any of the financial aspects of retirement. We assume you have enough to retire if that’s what you’re thinking. What we work on is the social and psychological aspects of retirement, right? Social, emotional, and psychological. Because retirement is a massive transition.

You are, it’s like going from college to the workforce or from high school to college or from unmarried to marriage. It’s a humongous transition in terms of how you live your life. So what we focus on is helping you think through those things. And by those things, I mean, what are you gonna do with your time? What kind of structure are you gonna have when you don’t have work? Because structure is very important. Without structure, people flounder. What are you gonna do with your time?

Who are you going to do it with? What is important? What are your values? How much time do you want to giving back? How much time do you want to spend with your grandchildren? How much time do you maybe want to continue to work doing something? So going through each of those areas in your life and developing an overall plan based on what’s important to you. So you’re creating something you can move to is what the time of coaching is. And it’s a process. We go through a series of exercises.

And much like this conversation, it goes where it goes. Sometimes people decide they want to reinvent themselves and they go off and they start a business. And so they’re not retiring, they’re doing something different like you. Or sometimes they decide they really do want to retire and they want to spend their time volunteering or working at a church or a synagogue. They do different things. So we’re flexible in terms of the process because we don’t know where it’s gonna go. We don’t typically work with people who know what they want.

that they want something else and they want to move towards something else and they don’t necessarily know what that is. We help them find it.

speaker-0 (08:02.83)
Okay, Dr. Riley Moynes, I interviewed a few weeks ago and he has a book called The Four Phases of Retirement. The first phase is what you described for yourself. You added three months. He said you do normally it’s like six months to two years type thing. Do you see that vacation phase followed by that what now?

speaker-1 (08:26.518)
Yes, all the time. And so the vacation phase is great. And then there’s a craft and it could happen three months could happen six months a year really just depends. My experience is that more high achieving senior professionals, we, I consider myself one of them, without the high achieving, but you know, senior person who left our work was such a central part of our lives that we didn’t necessarily have a lot of other things that we were doing.

hobbies, etc. But people that have a lot of hobbies and involvements while they’re working have an easier transition. So their vacation phase may last longer. We said more things to do and more interesting things they were going to fill that time with. So it might last longer, but the vacation phase can be anywhere as he says from, you know, a couple months to a year or more. And then we all move into the dreaded, I like to call it the messy middle. Which might figure out what’s

speaker-0 (09:20.526)
Now

So do you see many people actually thinking ahead? Now I know it sounds like, okay, so let me rephrase this question. Do they engage you before they step out or do they engage with you when you get into that messy middle or that phase of loss or whatever?

speaker-1 (09:45.186)
It depends. It depends. My goal is to educate more people about engaging in this process before you leave, just to make sure that it is what you want, right? That you’re clear on what you want. That’s where the burnout versus ready to retirement comes in. So the earlier you engage in the process, the better planning you can do. So I’ll give you an example. You engage in the process early. Let’s say you decide you want to teach. You just love teaching. You want to move towards that. Well, you might need a certificate.

or you might need to go back to school or you might need to do something to get a credential to do that. And you can do that while you’re still working, right? So thinking about what you want to do and what might be involved in that process is important to do before you leave your core profession, if that’s what you end up doing. You also are engaged by a lot of people who their vacation ended and they are completely lost like I was. And so they engage somebody to help them through the process. They know something’s wrong.

They just don’t know what and they don’t know how to fix it. Extremely frustrating for high achievers because we have always solved problems. What do mean I can’t solve this problem? I didn’t have an answer.

speaker-0 (10:51.754)
Is there a sense of loss for the high achievers? you’re coming out the… everything. Yeah, you’ve…

speaker-1 (10:58.488)
Loss of your identity, loss of your social network. Your friends are at work. All my friends were my workmates. Loss of my relevance, right? What’s interesting to me is this, you go in the job market, maybe to you too, when you’re in your 60s, you have all this knowledge, but yet nobody wants it. It’s like not relevant anymore.

speaker-0 (11:20.364)
That goes to the ageism side.

speaker-1 (11:22.498)
Yes, exactly. How did it go from relevant to not relevant in a week? Okay, I know things move fast now with AI and all, but doesn’t move that fast. So it’s so, so interesting how it’s like you leave and suddenly didn’t exist. And then you feel it.

speaker-0 (11:38.894)
The last 20 years of my career, was a contractor. basically went from contract to contract and I was in demand, but I’ll never forget going into a meeting with AWS, Amazon Web Services. And them saying, no, we’re not going to go with you because you’re not going to be a fit for our culture. I’m going, I know more than everybody in your organization and you’re not. It’s like,

speaker-1 (12:08.994)
Well, so as an HR person, if anybody’s listening out there, that’s code for.

speaker-1 (12:17.496)
That’s code for you’re not a fit. Well, not only you’re old, there are other things that’s code for you’re not a fit for our culture. It’s you’re too aggressive, you’re too old, you’re too young, it could be anything. But that’s the most common one is we just don’t know if you’re gonna fit because our engineering teams are in their 20s and 30s.

speaker-0 (12:38.176)
It’s like them working with their dad. Yeah.

speaker-1 (12:41.518)
Yeah. Smart people though, and this I’ve written about this before in multiple places, smart companies are going to be the winners in this talent war because as, I think you and I talked a little bit about this, but I mean, as AI takes out the jobs at the bottom, the people that are going to be in demand are people like us that have a lot of knowledge, right? The legacy knowledge people are going to be the people that are in demand because the middle layer and the bottom layer are not going to be there.

And the companies that recognize that and retain the knowledge of their senior people are going to be the winners in the war, in the war, the talent war, the profit war.

speaker-0 (13:22.382)
Yeah, no, personally think it’s anything that is person to machine interaction is going to be replaced. But anything that’s person to person can’t be replaced by a machine or minimally replaced. So, for example, this conversation going on, kind of hard to do. So.

speaker-1 (13:44.066)
Hard to do today. Who knows what will be. You know, I don’t know.

speaker-0 (13:49.838)
You said you had written a book. Tell me about the book. What’s it about? What’s the title? And just for everybody else listening to this, I’ll put the link to the book in the description so people can find it.

speaker-1 (14:04.034)
Thank you. So I started out actually writing a sub step and I called it the next edit. And for me, edit is one of those words that really speaks to me because I think editing is iteration, right? I think of it as in agile terms, right? From a technology perspective, you you have an idea, you test it, you edit, test, edit, test, edit.

And so that’s why I named the sub stack the next edit. And the idea was to just, collected so much information and tools and all kinds of things as I was going through the process myself, I wanted to share them. So I started out writing the sub stack and then I’m like, well, if I do, why don’t I compile all of these into a workbook, if you will, or a manual. And that’s how your next edit came up, you know, came to be. So I took a lot of the writing and the tools and the resources that I had.

pull together and put them in the format of, in a way, a self-guided coaching process. I like to say that going through a process yourself, taking yourself through some of the exercises is a great way to start, and then you engage a coach to get to that next level. And also, let’s be honest, not everyone can afford a coach. And that doesn’t mean they don’t deserve to go through the process.

It could be what the person goes through and they never hire a coach. That’s okay too. The idea is to just get the information out there and help people who are feeling this. It’s such an odd thing when you’re thinking, you just don’t know what you’re feeling. You just know something’s not right and you wanna fix it.

speaker-0 (15:41.218)
You said something there, self-guided.

One of, earlier you had said when you left all your friends were at work. Yeah. They kind of trigger towards a isolationism. Is that part of the coaching that you deal with is get out?

speaker-1 (16:01.848)
Well, not only get out, but okay, I don’t know about you, but it’s not easy making friends in your 60s because friends, you know, think about how you’ve made friends in your lifetime. It’s been mostly proximity, right? You were in high school. These people were there every day. You found the ones you liked. You stayed away from the ones you didn’t, right? Then you went to college, same thing. Then you get into the work world, same thing. Suddenly when you leave work.

you’re very isolated and you’re not coming, unless you actively go out and pursue people, you’re not seeing people in your house, right? And if you didn’t have a broad, diverse network of people from activities and things that you did while you were working, your network of friends is pretty minimal. And you actually have to go out and find people. And I think if you read anything about friendship, it’s proximity, so you have to be close and often.

Right. And take something like 200 interactions with somebody to really bond in friendship. So that’s pretty hard if you’re doing Pilates three times a week and you, you you’re in there for an hour and maybe you have three minutes, three free word conversation with somebody, you know, where, where do you meet people? So that is a big piece of retirement coaching is built in helping people understand that and building their networks hopefully before they leave their work. So they’re not doing that crash.

Right? They’re not feeling isolated. I have worked with some people who literally said to me, you know, I knew, I knew something was wrong when at 10 o’clock in the morning, I started pouring wine because I didn’t know what to do. Okay. But that’s true. Like structure when the structure, if, if work is the central beam of your house, when you pull it out, everything else caves in everything. And so then you’re like, how did that happen? Like you weren’t expecting it.

So if you’re expecting it, you can plan for it because there’s so many things you can do ahead of time to prepare yourself.

speaker-0 (18:02.815)
I find though that a lot of people, and when I say a lot, I’m talking the vast majority of people, do not think ahead. They just react to whatever is happening at that time.

speaker-1 (18:14.286)
Favorite term, favorite word. I’ll figure it out when I get there. No, you won’t. Just like if this is my favorite. When I retire, I’m going to work out. I’m like, no, you’re not. If you didn’t work out before, you’re not going to suddenly start working. You have to build habits. You have to change how you think about things. You’re not going to just start working out because you have more time. You’re probably going to watch more TV. So in other words, it’s it’s we think we’re going to do all of these things, but typically we don’t.

speaker-0 (18:43.266)
I heard a term several interviews ago where when people actually find what they’re going to do, the purpose or what their focus, it’s actually a core component of their personality that’s always been there. It’s just never been fed.

speaker-1 (19:01.538)
Yes, my favorite exercise in the book is looking back to look forward. So what has your life been? Look at the timeline of your life. Look at the things you’ve spent your time doing. Where have you felt the happiest? What emerges is these patterns, right? That’s what emerged for me. I put together this giant timeline of my life, childhood, young adult, college, after college, and there’s through lines. For me, it was

Not helping people, helping people help themselves was my through line. When I looked at all of the times I had been the happiest, all the times I had been the most engaged, I was doing something to help other people help themselves get better so they could do something they wanted to do. Career coaching, college advising, executive coaching, retirement coaching, like all of my through line has always been that, but who would have known that?

I wouldn’t have. I wouldn’t have put all that together because they’re different chunks of your life. So one of the exercises, looking back to look forward, where are your through lines? And it’s amazing when people see them, the pattern, it’s like, wow. Okay, now what can I do with that?

speaker-0 (20:19.168)
Has doing all this coaching actually made you better? Because here’s where I’m coming from. I’m a long time coach, university level football coach. Though up here in Canada you don’t get paid for that, but that’s a different story.

speaker-1 (20:35.224)
Well, football are

speaker-0 (20:37.454)
American football. And I’ve always found that when I’m coaching, it makes me better. And as a result, I can coach better. So there’s a bit of a feedback loop.

speaker-1 (20:40.555)
Okay.

speaker-1 (20:56.642)
And I think that’s what I personally like so much about coaching. I learned from every single one of my coaches. There’s not a coaching session, whether it’s executive coaching, retirement coaching, where somebody doesn’t teach me something. That’s the other thing you miss when you leave work. I missed the conversations. Every Monday, I would learn something because somebody would say, what would you do this weekend? And they’d say, I did blah, blah, blah. And I’m like, really? Where did you do that? What is that? how is that? Like, I always learn something from other people at work.

whether it was intentional or not intentional, that goes away. So if you are, I’m a very curious person. I like to learn, I like to research. I go down really weird rabbit holes sometimes and hours pass by and I miss that because I always got those sparks from people at work and that was gone too.

speaker-0 (21:45.376)
Yeah, that’s that’s quite honestly, that’s reason why I’m doing this podcast. Yeah. I’m learning from everybody that I talk to, which makes me better and makes me more knowledgeable. So I want to ask more questions down the next path. sort of thing. One thing, though, while you were talking, it made me realize the older the people are that I’m talking to, the guests that I’m talking to, the less I have to say anything.

I think, tell me if I’m wrong, I think what happens is the older people get, the less people they have to talk to. So the more they want to talk.

speaker-1 (22:28.46)
the more they actually know.

speaker-0 (22:31.042)
Yeah, absolutely.

speaker-1 (22:32.238)
I listen, there’s a lot of young people I wish would zip it and listen. I think two of them are related to this. I might have given birth to two of But that’s a different story. I think there’s a desire to talk, but also a need to talk. Connection is so important. Again, one of the things that I think people overlook. So a lot of people say to me, I’ve heard a lot of people say, well, when I’m done working, I’m going to consult. OK.

Great, we’re with themself, fantastic. We’re going to use the skills you have, which a lot of people want to and do, use the skills they have in their work world somewhere else, right? But they fail to build their network before they leave. Like we talked about before, the difference between being employed and wanting to work and being unemployed and wanting to work is very different. So.

Building your network, if that’s what you want to do before you leave, getting on boards before you leave your job, because nobody wants you on their board when you’re not connected to a company or a mission or whatever. We don’t think about that. We think, I’ll figure it out when I get there. So I think it all plays into that. What do you need? What do you think you’re going to need?

speaker-0 (23:47.758)
The number of people I’ve met, and I’m not just talking about the people I’ve interviewed, that I’ve met that when they retire or are pushed out of whatever their final corporate job is, that go into consulting boggles my mind and they can’t find a job or consulting activity, or they find one but that’s it. Yeah. It’s…

speaker-1 (24:11.832)
There’s the other side too, though. The other side is you can find the work and you realize, well, that’s why I left. I don’t want to do this work anymore. Now what? That’s another, okay, so I found the work, I’m consulting, I’m making some money, I’m building a practice and I hate everything I’m doing.

speaker-0 (24:30.136)
But isn’t that also part of the reason why you retire in the first place? You were doing something you didn’t really want to do that wasn’t core to you.

speaker-1 (24:39.874)
Yes, but we forget that when we’re desperate in that messy middle and we’re lost. We grab onto the thing that feels the most comfortable, which is what we were doing before. And so when somebody calls you up, have friends who are CEOs of company now and they call me up and they say, I need you, come help me. I’ll be like, okay. You know, cause they need me, they’re speaking to me, they need me, somebody needs me. And then I get there and I’m like, I don’t want to do this.

You do it because they needed you.

speaker-0 (25:11.992)
Yeah. Yeah. No, you get to that missy middle, and then you try something, and it’s not right. And you try something, and it’s not right. And it just becomes circular.

speaker-1 (25:23.534)
But that’s the work. That’s the work. And that’s people don’t really understand. one of the books that really, I think I mentioned this to you before, one of the books that just set me straight, like put me, made me feel so much better was this book called Life is in the Transitions by Bruce Feiler. Great book. Reason I bring it up is because it really helps me understand that life is transition. Like you’re never not in a transition. We think transitions are so dramatic.

But in fact, the parts that are dramatic are when everything is stable, because it’s so few and far between. At any given time, you’re in a transition in some part of your life. We don’t think of it that way. So life is in those transitions. So knowing and understanding that every new beginning starts with something else ending, so work ends. Now you’re searching for that new beginning and that the time in between that is that messy middle. And the only way to find that new beginning is test.

Edit, test, edit, test,

speaker-0 (26:24.942)
And that’s where the patience comes in because people, I find, don’t have the patience to wait to see what happens as a result. They’re expecting instant results.

speaker-1 (26:37.71)
Well, okay, we live in instant gratification land, you so that’s part of the problem. But I also think it is, what are your goals? Right? So when I first retired, I said, okay, I’ve always wanted to try pickleball. So I tried pickleball and I’m like, okay, this is fun, but I’m just gonna do pickleball. And I hurt my ankle and I was really not pickleball. And I said, all right, I’m gonna try pottery. I was asked to keep me out of the pottery studio or any art studio, not my thing. Like I tried a lot of those things that I never tried before.

And I realized, I don’t want to do any of those things. Like I’m not a hobby girl. I don’t want that. So then I thought, well, what do I want? And then I was back to the beginning. So how do I figure out what I do want?

speaker-0 (27:20.27)
And that goes back to, if you didn’t do it when you were in your corporate career, why would you do it now?

speaker-1 (27:28.894)
Right. Exactly. So what do you want to do? If you didn’t want to do those things and you don’t want to do them now, it’s rare. The bane of my existence, people know that, is Mahjong, okay? Everyone keeps telling me I need to learn how to play Mahjong because that’s what I’m going to make friends and that’s how going to meet all these wonderful women and all my female friends that I do know, my mom friends, everybody, they all play Mahjong. Oh, you have to play Mahjong. So I tried to learn Mahjong. I’m like, I hate this. I don’t want to play.

Danes, it’s just, I’m sorry. But if I want to meet people, I have to make some concessions if that’s what I want to do. Or I have to find a different way to meet people. That doesn’t involve trials or cons.

speaker-0 (28:05.4)
Mm.

speaker-0 (28:12.62)
You should come up to Vancouver. I’m a visible minority here in Vancouver. Yeah, it’s it’s my wife is first generation, but her parents are from Canton province in Wow. Her San Francisco has the largest area. We have the largest population for Chinatown. That’s right.

speaker-1 (28:17.603)
Yeah.

speaker-1 (28:34.018)
Wow.

So she went larger.

speaker-0 (28:39.21)
I have a Majo set here in my closet. Okay.

speaker-1 (28:42.488)
So, I mean, you either love it or you don’t love it. what’s funny to me is that I never liked games anyway. My kids used to beg me, please play Battleship with me. Please play Monopoly. And I’d do it because they were my kids and they wanted to play, but I never have been a games person. So it’s like, why did I think I would suddenly like it?

speaker-0 (28:59.32)
think that’s hereditary though, coming from our parents, because they didn’t have TV, they didn’t have the internet, they didn’t have all these things. So what was there left?

speaker-1 (29:09.614)
My 91 year old mother is a game fanatic. She’s a bridge master. She plays canasta bridge, you name it. She plays Mahjong, you know, and she’s another one. She’s like, why did learn how to play a game? You’ll make friends. I’m like, I don’t know.

speaker-0 (29:23.17)
Different generation. Yeah. It’s like one thing I’ve learned is to not put my life on my kids. Yeah. Yeah. Like they’re going through their own things, their own life, their own experiences. I know what they’re going to go through in certain aspects. You get married, you have your fights, that sort of thing. But like they’re going into areas that I never thought of.

speaker-1 (29:52.622)
you know what’s interesting? I had a call last week with a young woman, probably one of my kids ages, who was calling me on behalf of, she was worried about her dad.

and he is lost in retirement. And she doesn’t know how to help them and what to do and what’s going on. So I think they’re just exactly right. can’t put your life on your kids, kids recognize when their parents are going through this massive change of transition and don’t know they’re struggling and they want help. So was interesting talking to her and I was able to give her some resources to share with him, just to try to put her at ease.

This is what he’s going through is normal. Okay, so don’t worry. But here’s some things you can do. I thought that was a really interesting aspect of retirement coaching is working with kids that are worried about that.

speaker-0 (30:50.99)
It’s funny. My dad’s 94. People that are listening to this podcast know I mentioned him a lot, but I look at him to see what’s coming for me so that I can anticipate that sort of when he, through his entire life, he was always into genealogy. And he’s got our family tree back like a thousand years. But six, eight months ago,

speaker-1 (31:15.502)
Wow.

speaker-0 (31:20.716)
He just stopped doing it. Now, I’m thinking there’s a bit of a transition going on there.

speaker-1 (31:22.574)
you

speaker-1 (31:30.37)
My dad too.

speaker-0 (31:32.982)
So, who’s, how’s, what’s the oldest person that you’ve ever worked with?

speaker-1 (31:38.478)
The oldest person I personally have ever worked with has been 75. But again, I think retirement is an interesting thing. People think of it as I’m retired. So I don’t know if you know this, but in the US, retirement was created back when we were coming out of the depression. Social Security was created in the United States in an attempt to push people out of the workforce to make room for the younger people coming in who would never leave work.

speaker-0 (32:03.63)
Mmm.

speaker-1 (32:05.678)
So they had to encourage them to by giving them this money when they turned 65 to leave. So that is why we started retirement to make room for them. The young people to come into the workforce because people were the job, hogging the jobs. But back then when you retired, maybe you lived 10 years. Today it’d be an extra 25 or 30 years. It’s a whole other lifetime. And the thing is in this lifetime,

things change just like they do in other lifetimes, right? From zero to 10, 10 to 20. But in this lifetime, you’re declining, right? So your first 10 years of retirement are gonna look different than your second 10 and your last 10, maybe, if you’re lucky, right? So I often, people say, I wanna travel. And I’m like, if you’ve got the money and you wanna do that safari, do it now, because you’re not gonna do it when you’re 80, or 75. It’s gonna be much harder, right? Because…

If you live where you live now and you think you want to stay, that’s great. Where are you going in 10 years? Can maintain your home? Do you need to go to a, you know, you know, the kids? Do you want to stay near your family? Do you want to live with, right? Everything changes as you age, but it could be 25 or 30 years you’re talking about.

speaker-0 (33:17.326)
Yeah, I think the best thing we can do with people, I’m gonna make this point and then I’m gonna ask you another question, is not to tell them what to do. Nobody likes to be told what to do. But ask questions that make people think.

speaker-1 (33:38.03)
That’s right. 100 % asking them questions that stop them dead in their tracks and they go, oh, I didn’t think of that. Like, okay, that’s nice. You have a beautiful home. You don’t have, I said, oh, where’s your elevator?

What do mean? I don’t have an elevator. I’m like, you don’t have an elevator, huh? How do you plan to get upstairs in 10 years or 15 years?

speaker-0 (34:00.974)
Hey, I’m 61, I’m already starting to feel it.

speaker-1 (34:04.398)
But we don’t think about those things. So thinking about retirement, but everything is process, right? Iterate, iterate, iterate. What’s good today isn’t going to necessarily be good tomorrow. Life is in the transitions.

speaker-0 (34:18.744)
So that brings another point. And this is starting to be something that I’m really starting to notice. If you look at all the research, market research, anything that’s associated with government, it’s in 10 year increments until it gets to 65. Then it’s 65 plus and they aggregate or consult, sorry, consolidate all the information for anything over 65. But considering, hell, my dad being 94,

the number of people that are outliving that. You can’t tell me that me, who’s a baby boomer, and my dad, who comes from that previous generation, have the same thinking.

speaker-1 (35:00.928)
And that is 100 % why I think there’s such an opportunity for people to really make retirement what they want it to be at different phases. So I’ll give you an example. I belong to several organizations that are for women. And again, it’s 60 plus. And you show up at these meetings and you go to these events and you have everyone from 60 to 90.

speaker-0 (35:29.262)
Hmm.

speaker-1 (35:30.126)
Although the women who are 90 are very lovely and nice, and I like talking to them because I learn stuff. I am looking for my peers, right? I’m looking for the other women that are in their 60s. Even the ones that are 10 years older than me are having a different experience. 75 is different than 65. So we’re not parsing retirement the same way we do other groups. You would never throw a whole bunch of high school kids with a whole bunch of kids that just graduated college, right?

They’re different life experiences. And one of the things in the book that I, at the end of the book is this annual review, this compass review. I don’t know if you’ve heard of the annual compass. It’s a fairly well-known tool, but just every year taking stock, every year looking, how was this year? Looking at your calendar, where did I spend my time? What did I like? What didn’t I like? What do I want to adjust for the next year? Really is very important when you’re retiring and you’re planning out those next things, right?

What worked, didn’t. Couples retiring, whole different thing. We do coach couples also. Pull another ball away because you’ve got two people. Sometimes both have retired at the same time. Sometimes one’s retired, one’s not. Sometimes one never worked outside the home and one is now retiring and wants her husband to be out of her hair, know, like guys following around the house. Can you have lunch? No, I can’t have lunch. I have a life. You know, I built a life while you were at work. Do something else.

Right, so navigating those things with not only spouses, but family.

speaker-0 (37:03.574)
Yeah, I was gonna ask you like everything you just described was husband wife or partner. Yeah.

speaker-1 (37:10.25)
But kids too. Mom, you can babysit every day for them. I don’t need a nanny anymore, do I? I’m like, no, you do need a nanny. I’m not your nanny. I did my job. I’m the grandma now. I want to be fun. know, I want to be Disney grandma. I don’t want to be take care of you and drive you to school and practice grandma all the time. So kids expectations of what their parents are going to do. Very interesting millennial children.

What did we mess them up? I just want to tell you as parents, their expectations of us as grandparents are so different than what I expected of my parents as grandparents. And navigating that and setting boundaries and figuring out how much of your time you want to devote to family activities. And I say want to, but then there are a lot of people that have to.

Right? How about the taking care of aging parents? How does that factor into how you spend your time? Me personally, my parents live about a mile now, move them closer, about a mile and half from me. And several times a week, my time is helping them, taking them to doctor’s appointment or shopping or whatever. And I’m happy to do it. But you don’t think about those things when you’re planning for retirement.

speaker-0 (38:34.306)
Yeah. Well, one thing I’ve become very aware of is that I guarantee you I’m driving my wife nuts right now. But no, what about, early retirement? there’s been, I interviewed a gentleman that has his own podcast about early retirement, basically showing his journey as he’s going through early retirement and he retired at, what did he say?

speaker-1 (38:43.566)
I’m sure you will.

speaker-0 (39:03.726)
52, 53, I’m going by memory. My memory is not the one I used to. Yeah. yeah. And he went through that vacation phase for six months. And then he was like, what do I do now? And that’s why he started that podcast to track what he was doing while he was going through retirement.

speaker-1 (39:08.814)
Part of the journey too.

speaker-1 (39:26.03)
But I would tell you that even people who are retired, most of them, many of them are not retired. He’s retired. He’s rewired. He’s re-engineered. He’s some other work, re-edited. He’s doing other things. So our view of retirement is crafted by, again, what I said before, the 65 year old people who leave the workforce and then they garden, they travel, they hang out with their grandkids, they walk on the beach. I mean, look at the commercials.

on TV. That’s what retirement has been defined as. That’s not what our generation boomers are doing. We’re leaving corporate life, but we’re doing a lot of other things. But I call it a portfolio life. Okay, we’re building a life that’s made up of many different things, some of which a slice of which for me, it’s about, you know, 20 to 30 hours a week of work, some work, not what I was doing before, but some work. Some

portion of my life is grandparents, being a grandparent. portion of my life is taking care of my parents. Some portion of my life is travel, whatever it is, however you build your portfolio. But we’re not doing nothing. we’re not just sitting, nobody’s sitting back just doing nothing.

speaker-0 (40:43.244)
My last two interviews, last one was with the PR director from Road Scholar. And Road Scholar has completely changed the language that they’re using because elder is is considered a dirty word by people that are older. Rick Moody, who used to be on the board from Elder Hostel, he’s been doing this sort of thing for a while. also said that the entire concept

of aging and retiring is basically being thrown out the window.

speaker-1 (41:17.696)
It’s again, and you know, this is a little different for women than it is than it is for men. And let me tell you, tell you why I think so. My gen average boomer, boomer women, we have nobody to look to for any kind of role modeling, because most most of my mother, her generation were not corporate. Some were teachers, nurses. The women’s work was different.

when my mom grew up and ultimately became retirement age, right? So we don’t really have any role models the same way men do. Men always worked, always retired, have a lot more things to look to in terms of crafting a life that works for them. So I think it’s a little bit bifurcated, it’s catching up, but it’s interesting to talk to these women who are the first managing partner of a law firm.

the first female CEO.

speaker-0 (42:18.811)
And they’re now getting to that age where it’s time to move to the next phase.

speaker-1 (42:22.862)
And they’re not wanting to do what everybody’s done. They’re starting businesses. are doing consulting, but they’re starting businesses. They’re working for not-for-profits. They’re making products for women of our age. A friend introduced me to somebody who’s just started a beauty company for 50 plus. You see, 50 plus. now, I said, well, maybe you should have products for 50s, 60s, 70s. We’re not all the same.

speaker-1 (42:52.846)
It could be anything. It could be anything you can imagine. But if you plan it first, you have a better shot of accomplishing.

speaker-0 (43:00.588)
I’m interviewing Helen Dennis on Friday of this week. She’s a columnist and she’s starting to focus on exactly that. These type of years specifically for women.

speaker-1 (43:14.062)
Amazing. And there’s so many people out there doing interesting work in that area. Because women and men are not the same. We don’t age the same. We don’t think the same. you we interact, right? So there’s that crossover. But what happens to women when they’re 75 and what happens to a man at 75? Not the same, not the same. We’re just genetically not the same.

speaker-0 (43:38.446)
Yeah. One thing I had to comment in one of my earliest interviews from a blue collar worker saying that everybody talks about retirement from a white collar perspective. But very few people talk about it from a blue collar perspective. Have you seen any of that?

speaker-1 (44:01.996)
have in fact the woman I was talking to the young woman I called me her dad was a retired policeman I don’t know if you I guess that’s a blue collar job I mean I think

speaker-0 (44:13.564)
They’re not to me white collars

speaker-1 (44:16.558)
world, right? But he was going through the exact same things as corporate people were. Same thing. Didn’t matter if it was blue or white. It was his identity. It was his social network. He got up every day and went to a place and saw his friends. So I don’t see a tremendous amount of difference. What is different is how, from a financial perspective, how they experience retirement. Sadly, we don’t pay teachers what we should in this country.

hopefully they do better in Canada, I mean, a retired teacher doesn’t have the same options even with a pension as somebody who worked in corporate and socked away a lot more money over the years. And then there a lot of people who just didn’t sock any money away no matter what they did. So I mean, it’s not blue or white or pink collar, right? It’s…

speaker-0 (45:06.35)
They were living paycheck to paycheck through their entire life.

speaker-1 (45:09.652)
Right. And some have to, some choose to. And so the people who choose to, say, okay, that was your choice. The people who have to, I feel that my book is my gift to them. You got to think about these things too. You may not be able to implement them all at once. Maybe you can find solace in doing something on a Saturday that you love because you still have to work or because you have to put…

builds on the, know, food on the table. I mean, not everybody could afford a coach, but everyone should be able to think about what they want their elder years to be.

speaker-0 (45:51.374)
I love the air quotes. It just means that the language is changing. Correct.

speaker-1 (46:00.686)
Not my editing years. I’m editing.

speaker-0 (46:03.054)
There you go. We’re getting close to the end of the conversation. And one of the things I always do with my guests is I ask them, if you’re going to give one piece of advice, what would it be?

speaker-1 (46:19.768)
Don’t jump. Plan.

Yeah. You’re not ready to retire potentially. You might just be burned out. Don’t mistake one for the other. It’s devastating when you realize you did it.

speaker-0 (46:35.84)
Yeah, I’m starting to realize, I remember when I want to say 25, 30 years ago, I came across a stat where people change careers four times in their life. I’m starting to view this as a changing career.

speaker-1 (46:53.454)
Really? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. You did you ever think you’d be a podcaster?

speaker-0 (47:00.2)
No. First off, the term podcaster wasn’t around when I was back then. But the other aspect is one thing I did do back in the 90s was I had a radio show.

speaker-1 (47:12.536)
See?

speaker-0 (47:13.386)
On a talk radio. Through line. And that’s actually how this came about.

speaker-1 (47:20.654)
Amazing. Yeah, so I mean, that’s the thing. What skills do you have? How do you maybe want to use them in a different way? Many people do stay close to their profession. They just deploy their skills differently.

speaker-0 (47:35.31)
Andrea, thank you very much for taking the time. Thank you for having me. For everybody watching, I will put the website, the link to the book, and feel free to do that and reach out to Andrea if you want any help or support. I’m sure she or somebody in her group would be able to help. Anyway, Andrea, thank you very much.

speaker-1 (47:59.586)
Thank you, Neil. Enjoyed it.