Book Review: The New Retirementality by Mitch Anthony

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Join Dave and Nick as they review another helpful book about financial planning. The New Retirementality by Mitch Anthony.

You can save yourself the time of reading the book by listening to this episode instead – or it may spark your interest enough to pick up your own copy.

Main Theme: Americans need to re-think retirement, focusing on creating a rewarding, phased-in retirement on their own terms rather than one dictated by outdated workplace norms and government-created age milestones.

Audience: Middle–class Americans who are unsure about the psychological meaning of retirement and who want to look beyond finances and concentrate on the overall quality of life.

Summary:

• Retirement as we think of it today grew out of the beginning of the Industrial Age as governments and unions sought to create job openings for younger workers. Corporations and governments created pensions and social programs, such as Medicare and Social Security to support the idea of retirement. The ages they set for retirement, at the time, were about the same as life expectancy. 
• The way we have been led to think about retirement, as a hard – stop from the working world and an immediate transition to a life of leisure means, for many people, a life in retirement that is unrewarding and hollow as it is completely focused on the self.
• As a solution, Anthony suggests pre-retirees take to make a deep examination of what they find important and fulfilling and create a “New Retirementality” that may involve doing meaningful work rather than solely focused on leisure and relaxation.
• Anthony’s book provides worksheets and exercises to help facilitate this thought process and allow readers to develop their own version of a meaningful retirement.

Dave’s Take: 

• While I think Anthony is a bit dogmatic in his approach, this book touches on an important and neglected aspect of retirement. Too many people retire based on age milestones, and without something meaningful to retire to. As a practitioner, I’ve seen plenty of folks who regretted retiring, not for monetary reasons but because they found retirement boring or otherwise unfulfilling.
•  The worksheets, exercises, and tools do provide a guide to creating a unique retirement for do–it–yourself folks and the approach is not too different from the life planning approach we implement with pre-retirement clients.
• For Anthony’s intended audience, middle and upper – middle-class Americans with careers and time remaining to implement such a plan the book does a great job. However, there are many pre-retirees who don’t have the luxury of working longer for physical reasons or lack the flexibility to phase in retirement. That said, I do recommend the book for people struggling with the psychology of retirement.

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