Ted Kaufman and Bruce Hiland: Episode 662

Transcript

[0:00:42] DA: Heading for retirement isn’t just about money, retirement has changed dramatically since our parent’s generation. People are living far longer with far better health than ever before, both mentally and physically. Instead of slowing down, people are leaving their jobs, feeling ready to take on the world. They’re financially independent, they’re active and they’re capable, and then suddenly, they have nothing to do. Ted Kaufman and Bruce Hiland’s new book Retiring takes a profound look at 21st-century retirement, helping you plan all the non-financial aspects of what comes next. Drawing the expertise of today’s modern vibrant retirees, Retiring offers a concise, practical, and conversational guide to the best chapter of your life. Hey Listeners, my name is Drew Applebaum and I’m excited to be here today with Ted Kaufman and Bruce Hiland, authors of Retiring: Your next chapter is about much more than money. Ted, Bruce, thank you for joining. Welcome to The Author Hour podcast.

[0:01:37] TK: Glad to be here.

[0:01:39] BH: Pleasure to be here, Drew.

[0:01:40] DA: Now, let’s kick this off. Can you give us a rundown of, maybe, your professional backgrounds, or what you two are doing today?

[0:01:50] TK: Bruce and I, we started out on a similar road and that was, we both went to get a master’s business administration at the Warden School back in the- a long time ago. Then after that, I went on to go to work for the DuPont Company in Wilmington Delaware. I worked there for a number of years. Then in 1972, I was working for the development department but I had some spare time, so I started working around the democratic party and in the process of doing that, I met a 29-year-old New Castle County councilman named Joe Biden who was thinking about running for Senate that year. I had also met his sister who ran his campaign, Valerie Biden-Owens. Valerie called me one day and she said, “Would you come down and talk to my brother about helping his campaign?” I went down and visited with him and he said, “What do you think?” I said, “Well,” I said, “Joe, I really think you’re really talking about some great issues. You really are in issues that I really agree with, but the problem is, for you is, that there are no elected democrats in Delaware and at your position. The governor’s Republican, the two senators are Republican, the congress person’s a Republican, the Mayor of Wilmington’s a Republican, the legislature is a Republican. Not only that, but you're running in 1972 with Richard Nixon at the top of the Republican ticket and George McGovern at the Democratic, and it was clear that Nixon was a lot more popular in Delaware than McGovern.” I said, “I will work for you in this campaign but I don’t think you’ll win” and then he smiled to me and said, “Okay, well we will just see.” Of course, the rest is history. He did win and then he hired me to work for him, and for 22 years, I worked for him. Most of those years - 20 some years - as his chief of staff until 1995. Then, in 1995 I decided it was time to do other things and so I did that and I really – it’s really kind of the definition of what retirement is, I really retired in 1995. I was still working 65 hours a week but it was at my direction, it was based on what I want to do. Working for Joe Biden was a wonderful experience, a great person to work with and I continued to work with him, all those years to almost 25, 26 years after that. Then I went to – one of the major things I did was I went to teach at Duke University School of Law. I taught there and at the Sanford School of Public Policy and also at The Fuqua, a business school, for 26 years and then I retired. Again, I retired. Then in 2008, really, Joe Biden was elected vice-president of the United States, and the governor, Governor Ruth Ann Minner, had to find someone to replace him for two years in the senate and she picked me. I spent two years in the Senate, the United States Senate. Really, at that point, I consider that failing retirement because that was a 65-hour Monday through – every - 24-hour job. I did that for two years and then when that was over, I did a number of things: I was chairman of the Congressional Oversight Panel of the TARP. I did a whole number of things, including helping then Vice-President Biden. I went on his staff for a while and then clearly, in 2020, I got very involved in his campaign. Then in February 2020, he asked me to lead the possible President Biden presidential transition if, in fact, he won the race. Starting February of 2020, as I said, I led the transition, hired the people, set it up, really had wonderful people and then he won, and the transition ended on January 21st at the inauguration. And I am now in the process of trying to get back to being retired.

[0:05:59] DA: I love that you retired several, several times but you worked probably more than everybody. Bruce, how about you?

[0:06:05] BH: Ted and I managed to screw up retirement regularly. I came out of Wharton, went into management consulting, I went to Mackenzie. Then because my real interest there was working with the kind of, the human side of top management, after I think five years or so, I went off on my own and had a really fascinating career, pretty much all the way through as an independent management consultant with typically, I had one, maybe two chief executives that I worked alongside. I had a five-year gig when I went into Time Inc. which I’ll get to in a minute. The pattern for me was that I was working flat out, having a wonderful time, fascinating work, and it was the intense world of New York business. I was- My first effort at retirement came about in 1991. In the late 80s and I’ve been – my principal client was the chairman of the New York stock exchange - and I was working with them to, sort of, help them with this transition. During that time, my family had purchased, well, my wife and I had bought a place in Vermont, which was our sanctuary from New York. When my client found out this, found out about the purchase, he said, “Okay, here’s the deal, you don’t retire until I do,” because he could see what was shaping up. Anyway, he retired, and then I retired the first time in ’91. I went from New York to a little village outside of Middlebury Vermont, grew a beard, started working at, kind of what I call a ‘fun farm’ with 20 acres or so, and we had all the sheep, goats and cattle you could ask for. That lasted about six months and I got a call from the chairman’s successor who suggested that I stopped building stone walls and get back to New York and give him a hand. I found out that that six months was kind of like a sabbatical for me. I went back full bore, commuting from Vermont to New York, kind of every other week, and did that until very early 2002. After the 9/11 experience, two things were going out: First off, the whole business world in New York obviously changed. My 90-year-old parents had decided to move from Florida to Vermont to retire. We had some opportunities to help them there and so, in January 2002, I retired for the second time. I retired from New York. But that didn’t really take because I got drawn into, and thoroughly enjoyed, being involved in all sorts of activities in Vermont with startup businesses, I got drafted to take over the school board, and that kind of community involvement. Along with a few partners, we owned a historic building, the core building in Middlebury and one of my partners had been running that for a number of years, then all of a sudden, he decided one day to move to Colorado. So the next thing I knew, I was in the real estate business, which was new and I took that over and ran that for, I guess, 16 years. The next time that I retired, the third and I think successful time was 2017. We sold the building, I stepped off all my community boards and backed off all my involvements that way. And, here we are: 81 years old and enjoying the winters in Florida and the rest of the year in Vermont.

[0:10:08] DA: Now, why was now the time to share the stories in the book? You two have clearly – you know, you’ve been in and out of retirement. Did you have, was there an inspiring moment? Did you have an “Aha!” moment or was it something as simple as, “Hey, now you’re actually finally retired,” you had some extra time on your hands and you picked this up as a hobby?

[0:10:27] BH: Well, I’ll just pick up on that quickly, I don’t think there was an “Aha!” moment. Ted and I, as I said, we’d get together for coffee over at the Burger King down when we wintered here together, down here in Florida. We kept finding more and more stories about people we knew or heard of who really weren’t happy in their retirement. Then, you know, you kind of trade anecdotes. Out of the conversation came a realization on both of our parts that, first off, we’ve been very fortunate and that was working for us, but there was a pattern here of people that were approaching retirement without doing enough planning about what they wanted to do. And, there were people who would retire who had adequate resources, but they didn’t have anything that was really satisfying them, using their time well. The trigger moment was the day Ted looked across the table and said, “Hey, we ought to write a book.” That was four years ago I think.

[0:11:33] TK: Yeah, we’d talked about this for a while and, obviously, he was in Vermont most of the year and I was in – well, moving to Delaware, but we just repeatedly came across people who really were very unhappy. They spent a lot of time planning the financial side of what they were going to do, which we encourage everyone to do that reads the book: get the financial things straightened out - but they really hadn’t spent the time worrying about what actually it’s going to do. I know that sounds crazy but we just kept running into people, that’s really what they were doing, they had just not figured out what they were going to do. What we kind of stumbled onto was the reason is that when Bruce’s parents, and my parents, and most of the people we were talking to’s parents retired, they usually worked for a major organization and they usually retired at 65. They would retire at 65 and essentially, back then with the life expectancy, they probably lived seven, eight years, or something like that. They’d be looking forward to that. So, essentially, you could just do a few things and, after about four or five years, they found out, “Well, I traveled a lot and I like my golf and I’m doing all these things, but I need something more,” but shortly after, they didn’t have to worry about it for too long. What has happened now more and more when we talk to people is, a lot of people are retiring at 55. Now, you have to understand our definition of ‘retirement’: Our definition of ‘retirement’ is – and that’s one of the hardest things to do with the book because we’ve got two different groups: One, the group of our parents, who looked at retirement as you lived and worked to 65 and then retire, and the people who are being retired now and many of them retire as early as 55. And, again, our definition of retirement is ‘retirement’ now is not when you get a check and a gold watch, retirement now is when you can work on the things you want to work on, that you can be your own boss, that you can be - kind of what I did when I left the senate office in 1995 - it’s essentially, I’d get up every morning and I would make the decision to where I was going. I loved working for Joe Biden, a great person, but I just wanted to start figuring out what I did. I got up every morning and Bruce did the same thing and we said, “Here are the things that we want to do.” We had reached what we thought was retirement. It’s a very different situation because, at 55, I know many people now who are 55, and some even younger, have retired. Well, if you’re 55 years old now, you have a life expectancy of 30 years. You have to plan, you have to do the financial piece, but then you’ve really got to plan what it is you’re going to be doing with your retirement, because the ‘normal’, the old day’s retirements, it just doesn’t work for 30 something years. As I said, I taught at Duke Law school for 26 years - after I retired! So, that’s really how things have changed. And one of the hardest things that Bruce and I had to deal with in the book was these two different views on retirement. That’s when we came to that definition that retirement is the time- Modern retirement is the time when you decide that you want to control your daily schedule and what you do.

[0:14:56] DA: So, while the two of you are planning on writing this book, in your mind, who were you writing this book for? Were you writing it for people who are retired now but unhappy, like you mentioned – a few of your friends who have been talking to you? Is this people very close to retirement, people in their 30s or is it maybe a combination of both?

[0:15:17] BH: I think the focal point in the audience, as we were writing, was a person who was approaching retirement, you know, whether it was within two years, three years, five years, whatever. That gave us a focal point to talk about how the three questions, the three big questions you’ve got to answer: When are you going to retire? What do you want to do? And where are you going to live? And then, to think about planning how you take care of yourself, as we said. First, it’s your body, then it’s your mind, and then it’s your heart, and then it’s your soul. For putting the book together, what we wanted to do was have a concise practical guide for somebody who was approaching retirement. We tell them right upfront, if you haven’t done your financial planning, you should do that first because you have to understand what your resources are as you try to make these decisions and these plans. That was the first person that we were talking to. However, in the process, - and going back over all the anecdotes we’d heard and sharing a lot of this with friends and acquaintances - we found out that what we were talking about and the way we were talking about it was very helpful for people that had retired perhaps two years, three years, four years, five years ago, but had found out they hadn’t done the planning. They didn’t – they weren’t fulfilled, they weren’t finding a good use of their time. And then, the third group, which I was reminded of only yesterday, is the partners of people who are retiring, and getting the conversations going where there’s a partnership - husband and wife or whatever - getting those conversations going so that you can make good decisions and carry them out.

[0:17:18] TK: Yeah, I think it clearly was both groups. We really did start out though, thinking perspectively, and I think it’s based on our experience, which was we both had planned for our retirement a number of years in advance. In my case, 1991. I was working as Senator Biden’s Chief of Staff, and we were involved in Supreme Court nominations and we used to hire a constitutional expert every time we did it from the university. We hired Chris Trader who is a Constitutional Expert from Duke Law School. After the board nomination was over and the Thomas nomination was over, Chris came to me and said, “Ted, I want to teach a course at the Duke Law School on congress. Will you teach it with me?” I said, “Oh Chris, look, if you’re Chief of Staff for a senior United States Senator-“ and Senator Biden was one of the two “-you don’t have time to do anything like that.” He said, “Well, just think it over.” And I went home that night and talked to the smarter of my half, I talked to her. In about 15 minutes, she said, “Well, what is your plan for what you're going to do? I mean, are you going to do this for the rest of your life?” And we sat down, and over a series of about a week, we said “No, that’s not – I really would like to get out on my own at some point.” And we said, “Well, when would that be?” and we figured out 1995. I went back to Chris and said, the first thing back to Chris, “If you're still interested, I think I may have a way to do this.” He said, “Sure, I’m interested.” I said, “But I’ve got to talk to Senator Biden.” I went down and I went and sat down with Senator Biden. I said to him, “Chris Trader’s asked me to do this, teach with him at the Duke Law School, and it’s something I’d really like to do”. I said, “There’s only one class a week on Monday’s and what I could do is I could fly down to Durum on Monday morning, teach the course and be back that night, so I’d be gone from the office for a day, a week for-” I forget how many weeks it was that we met. He was really, I mean, he was really enthusiastic, he said, “I think that’s great Ted, I think that’s really something that you really ought to do.” I did it and it turned out to be just a wonderful, wonderful experience. And then, at 1995, I retired. But that was, I think, Bruce, it’s fair to say, that that was the original target, it’s people like that. Then, once we got started, as Bruce said, he talked to so many people who really failed retirement and it was clear that the information’s the same, we just had to kind of reorient it.

[0:19:54] DA: What’s wrong, if anything, with the way Americans typically approach retirement? You know, you set a financial number, you hope to get to that number and then you relax in the sun? Is that not the case on how it works out?

[0:20:12] BH: That’s an interesting caricature. I think there’s a couple of different forces at work there. First off, is that there’s an incredible amount of money spent telling people that are going to retire that all they’ve got to work on is financial planning. There’s just, you know, you see the ads, you see the articles, you see the gurus on TV. I think that can distract people from thinking about what they’re going to- with how they’re going to spend their time. The second part of it is that the idea of having a blank slate, I think, I’m pretty certain, scares a lot of people. I have a colleague I’ve worked with for 20 odd years, who heads a very prestigious wealth management organization. He suggested that, early on, when we were talking about the concept of this book, he said, “Oh yeah, the title ought to be Overcoming Denial.” I said, “Huh?” He said, “Yeah”. He said the problem is, they’re working with their clients all the time on obviously, wealth management and financial issues. Because of the relationships they have, they were instinctively trying to get these clients to think about, “Okay, what are you going to do with the rest of your life?” That's substantial resources in most cases. “How are you going to spend your time? What do you want to do?” It’s not just, “What are you going to do with your money?” it’s “What are you going to do with your life?” He explained that that conversation was a non-starter with an awful lot of people because they didn’t want to think about what they were going to ‘be’ or ‘do’ after they stopped ‘being’ or ‘doing’ whatever they are. There’s an anecdote that bears on this: I was going through meeting a new client, being escorted around by the CEO and we were walking around the headquarter’s top floor, and there was a corridor that went off to the right and there were a bunch of offices, fancy offices. I said, “So, what’s down there?” He said, “Those are the ‘formerlies’.” And I said, “Excuse me?” He said, “The ‘formerlies’. He was formerly secretary of whatever, he was formerly CEO of such and such.” These were people that had retired, they were kind of board-level advisors but they didn’t know what they wanted to do and they were just kind of hanging on. They weren’t – it turns out these people weren’t too happy, they didn’t add a lot of value because they hadn’t figured out what to do after they left their principal position. So, a lot of forces at work.

[0:23:00] TK: I also think, it’s very hard, it’s hard to deal with it. One of my favorite sayings is “change is great, you go first.” Change is difficult to deal with, that’s number one. Number two is, for most people, for a lot of people, the years before they retire are the most productive and most important and, in many cases, the busiest time of their lives. That’s when they’ve kind of reached the, usually, the epitome of their career. It’s not like they’ve got a whole lot of time to sit down and figure out what they’re going to do and, as Bruce said, there’s a lot of denial going on, there’s a lot of emphasis on the financial side. I mean, if you just go and look at the books that are available on retirement, I bet well over 95% of them are about the finances. People said, “Well, I don’t have a whole lot of time to do this, I’m very busy, why don’t I go with the stuff that’s easy?” It’s a lot easier to sit down with a Wealth Manager and figure out - I’m not saying it’s ‘easy’, I’m just saying it’s ‘easier’ - sit down with a Wealth Manager when you don’t have a whole lot of time in your daily schedule to do it and figure out the math of what it is that you want to be doing than sit down and say, “Okay, you know, what is it that I’m going to be doing when you get out?” But you know, the other side is that what people find when they retire, one of the things I found just about uniformly retiring folks is, Joe Biden has a great quote, he said, “Your job is about a lot more than a paycheck. What your job is and who you are in the community, it’s the people you know, it’s the people you deal with.” What I found repeatedly over and over again, people would say, “Well, I left the job and then I thought I’d have this time and I’d go to lunch with my friends, and the vast majority of my friends are people that I worked with every day. I’d go to lunch, the first time, and we were talking about what was going on back there. I’m going to tell you, when I – I have so many friends in Wilmington that worked for DuPont, they are still talking about what happened back at DuPont, like, 30 years ago. And then, what happens is, you don’t have much to talk about anymore. You know, it is not something you can do. And what many people told me - and I didn’t have this experience - but many people told me - and they told Bruce too - that, you know, after they meet, they have lunch and then they have lunch again a month later, and then they just kind of drift away, because the only thing they talked about, that they had in common with those folks, was the job. When it wasn’t there, whether they were interested in football, or they were interested in baseball, it was like, you know, it was the job. So, once you leave the job, you leave behind the recognition of who you are in the community, you leave behind the friends that you made for the many years that you worked in the job and in the industry, and so, that is one of the reasons why we wrote the book. Because so many people failed retirement were kind of- And so many and so many people’s partners, spouses said that their spouse had failed retirement and they were just not enjoying it. That’s one of the reasons why people don’t do with the planning. It’s because it is very hard and, as Bruce said earlier, it is also about denial. “I’ve got other things I’m doing, it is going to be hard, I’ll figure that out when I retire.”

[0:26:18] DA: What are the really important questions that you should be asking yourself besides anything monetary-wise when you are thinking about retirement? In those final years when you are scrambling, like, what should you really spend time and have that discussion around and about for yourself?

[0:26:37] BH: Well, as I mentioned a minute ago, Drew, the book is structured so that we kind of invite the reader into addressing three questions, and that is: When are you going to retire, and curiously, what are the other changes that’s happened since our parents did this? The choice of when to retire is much more the individual’s than it used to be and people do realize that they can retire before the retirement date. There’s an anecdote in the book: A friend of mine who was retired at 55, he was going full bore in a big corporation and he was talking to a guy who was 10 years his senior, outside of business - and the conversation was about work, getting to retirement - and this guy said, “You ought to retire now.” And, Nick said, “Why?” And he said, “Because the next 10 years are going to be the best years of your retirement if you do it now.” Anyway, first question is “When?" And then the next question is: “What are you going to do?” And that’s the big question that we’ve talked about the critical importance of having a central focus. We use the metaphor of having an anchor store, like when you are building a mall, you want to have an anchor store and then you could fill in around the anchor store with other things you want to do. Then, given when you’re going to retire and what you’re going to be doing: “Where do you want to live?” That is a question that keeps coming up again as you move through retirement because it’s like as your activities change, you may want to be in different places. Those are the three core questions. Then, we talk about the importance of maintaining yourself and all the parts of yourself. There are plenty of questions and worksheets in the book to get people to think carefully and intelligently about how they maintain their mind, their body, their heart. When I say ‘heart’, I mean in the sense of relationships, the heart that goes pitter-pat when you pick up your granddaughter. And then, your soul. We don’t talk about that in religious terms, we’re talking about ‘the soul’ in the sense of that feeling you have as to how your life has contributed. You know, “What was this all about?” and that needs to get some attention. Interestingly, the research shows that people in their 60s, which is about the time all of this is going to be going on, that’s about the time that people start thinking about, “Okay, what do I want to do that’s meaningful? It doesn’t have to be meaningful in a grand social sense, but meaningful to me so that I have, maybe my partner and I have, the sense of having made of a good trip.”

[0:29:43] TK: Yeah, and I think the spiritual thing too, is there’s a number of studies that show that ‘spiritual’ - again, not necessarily religious - spending your senior years on spiritual things increases the quality and the length of your life. There is all kinds of, in the book, we have a number of books and websites on again, not – it doesn’t have to be religious. To some people it is religious, it’s religious for me, but it doesn’t have to be - we have a number of websites and books that you can get on the spiritual side, and I think that’s important. The basic challenge for retirement is determining “What should the rhythm of my life be?" There is a rhythm of someone who is nearing retirement where they are doing twenty-four hundred thousand things at an incredible rate of speed and you have to, kind of, you can’t get into them too deeply. Again, people that are working can get into things deeply, but I am saying they have to do it at a rate, that high rate of speed. One of the things, one of the toughest things about the two times that I failed retirement and Bruce failed retirement, which we agreed on right away, was you kind of spend – when you go into retirement, you’re going to spend some time if you do it the right way doing really important things but also doing them deeper. The best example I can give is like when I came off the Biden’s president- the center of Biden’s presidential campaign, and if you talk to people who are involved in presidential campaigns - which is kind of the most high-speed thing that I’ve ever seen in my life, which is mostly spent around business and government - it’s the fact that it’s very difficult after a campaign is over to get back to your normal rhythm, and it is very difficult to do it and it’s true. The best example I can give is coming off from one of the campaigns, was about a year after the campaign was over, and I was still trying to get my rhythm under control, and there was a faucet in the basement of our house. I went down, I looked at the faucet and it needed to be fixed. I worked on it for about 15 minutes and I got it back together again so it was working and I started to walk away and I turned around and I looked at it and I said, “You know, I know that in a week from now I’m going to be back to working on this thing. Ted, why don’t you get it right, spend the time - you have the time now - get it right to fix, really fix the faucet?” I think that’s the thing that’s the hardest to do when you go into retirement is to kind of get your rhythm of your life, to do things that are more slower moving, the things that are- again, where I say it’s instead of a mile-wide and an eighth inch deep, you’re trying to go an eighth inch wide and a mile deep in what you’re doing. When you fail retirement like Bruce and I did, it takes a while. When I failed the first time as a Senator for two years, it took me a year and a half to get back to the rhythm that I had developed 1995 and 2010. That is one of the key things. The other thing that makes it difficult is people have the illusion that they worked on the non-financial things. Time and again you tell people, and there’s three things that comes up, time and time again, of what you’re going to do when you retire: One is “I’m going to travel”, two is “I’m going to play golf or sports or something like that, hunting or fishing,” and then the third is “I’m going to spend time with my kids and my grandkids”. But again, if you have a seven-year retirement that can really fill up your days, but if you don’t – but it won’t fill up, you know, 25 days.

[0:33:24] BH: 25 years.

[0:33:26] TK: You really need to have something more substitutive and that again, we lay out in the book in terms of, as Bruce said earlier, ‘the anchor store’. And then, the one big thing for me in 1995, it was teaching at Duke Law school and the business school, and the public policy school. - That was the anchor store of what I was doing then and I was working on some other things at the same time.

[0:33:47] DA: Now, were the issues that you two had the same issues that your friends had? You mentioned that your friends had thought they built up to retirement correctly but they were still unhappy? Or did they have other issues that led to their unhappiness?

[0:34:02] TK: That’s a good question. I think we’ve laid out most of them in talking about the different things, so it was a whole – there were a lot of different things but again, we get back to the common ones we talked about before: In terms of the lack of planning leading up to what they were doing, the things that kind of summed it up, the misperception about what it is that they wanted to do, and once they started doing it, the length of time that retirement is now involved in retirement, kind of the definition of what retirement is. So, it’s kind of laid out in the book. It is really kind of a complex matrix of things that lead people to fail retirement and that’s really, you know, why you asked why we wrote the book. The main reason we wrote the book was to kind of layout, kind of a, as Bruce said earlier, a workbook effect, kind of, “Here are all the different areas that you should be watching out for when you retire and then once you watch out for them, here are the places that you can go to get the information to help you to solve these problems."

[0:35:08] BH: Yeah, just to add to Ted’s comment, one of the structural ideas that we hit on early, trying to figure out how to put this all together in a useful form, this is going to be a little bit like a guide book that you’d use planning a major vacation or a major adventure. The simple fact is that everybody’s retirement is different because everybody’s different. And, your question about did commonality of causal factors for failure, I guess my quick answer to that, Drew, would be every failed retirement is a special story to that person. When we were trying to figure out how to be helpful - which is our sole objective of this is to help people get it right for themselves - we avoided being prescriptive, we avoided suggesting that there were one or maybe two or three right things to do, and it’s kind of, if you will, on the highest level, it’s kind of the Socratic approach to getting the person who’s going to find that they have all these questions, getting them to work through what their personal answers are and their personal plans and with their partner when there is a partner involved. It’s so – every retirement is different, every person is different.

[0:36:42] DA: Now, is there someone or a group you can consult with to try to plan out your retirement a little more broadly? I think we all know that there’s financial retirement advisors out there, but to your point, you two are saying that there’s so much more, and so are there outside resources?

[0:37:01] BH: Well, Ted mentioned we folded a lot of resources into the book. We reference them, we footnote things and their reference to the back of the book, and then we suggest additional resources for the individual who recognizes a particular point that they want to have a better understanding of. They go off and do it themselves. I mean, this is a major life project. As far as there being ‘groups’, I don’t know of any groups. I am sure that people have book groups. You could probably, in the suburb, you could probably put together an ‘about to retire’ group. I haven’t heard of any. There are a handful of people out there that I think, I don’t know what the terminology is now, it’s like ‘Retirement Councilors’ or something? There is some name that suggests they want to offer this, you know, kind of a personal consultant. Okay, that might work for some.

[0:38:02] TK: I think most of the people can kind of figure it out. I think, as Bruce said earlier, it’s important, it’s really important to talk to your spouse or your significant other and I think it is really important to talk to your family. In a strange way, it’s really important to talk to the people that you’re presently working with, especially the person that you are working for, and get their advice. I know Senator Biden was very helpful to me when I was working through what it is that I was going to be doing, and then friends. I think it is good to talk to people you know who have already retired. I am a firm believer, I’m totally opposed to reinventing the wheel. Find somebody that’s done it, seems to be doing it well, and ask them for their help.

[0:38:44] BH: To add one note to that: one of the things that I found early on - this was after I left New York to go to the country in 1991 and be a fun farmer - one of the things was getting feedback from people that you were- that you would interact with in different circumstances, kind of outside the job place. I remember one experience, here I was, this guy who oriented the New York business world operating in my pace, and now up in this little village in Vermont, which doesn’t operate at a New York pace. I was in a conversation with somebody I’d gotten to know enough to ask the question, and I said, “So, you know, how am I being perceived?” And he kind of clocked his head and looked at me, he said, “You’re scaring a lot of people.” And I said, “Excuse me?” He said, “Yeah, you know, you move so fast and you want to get things done yesterday,” and that was extremely important feedback to have at that moment because I was trying to figure out how I was going to spend my time, and that was just a little bit of, you know, attitude, you know, counseling that came out of nowhere. Giving your friends, people that are close to you - they don’t have to be intimate friends - but giving people that have seen you in action and kind of have a grasp of what you’re doing, giving them an opportunity to provide input is essential.

[0:40:22] TK: The other thing is think outside the box in terms of what it is that you want to do. I know some of the best examples, in my mind, of people that have been successful, and I’m talking about really, in several cases, senior executives. I remember I had a friend who worked at the New York stock exchange as a trader, very, very successful in every way, and at his 75th birthday, I asked him what he was doing. He said, “Well, you know, I am coaching an 8th-grade girls’ lacrosse team and I’m working as a volunteer in an animal rescue shelter.” That’s the kind of thinking. I had another friend who was a big-time lawyer in the DuPont Company and he retired and he went to the local big wine store and he said to the proprietor, “I want to sell wine.” And the proprietor said, “Well, you know, I don’t need to hire anybody.” He said, “I’ll work for nothing for a while and see how it works out.” He did that for a number of years selling wine. He wasn’t afraid of the fact that people would come in and say, “Oh you know, you were a big-time executive and now you’re selling wine.” It’s something he really wanted to do and I think that’s really one of the keys to the rhythm, to really get in the rhythm under control with the others, really thinking about, “What is it that I really would like to do?” And not to worry so much about what people think about what you’re doing. It’s just, is it something you are finding satisfying?

[0:41:50] DA: Bruce, you actually mentioned it a few minutes ago, but I’d love to just revisit it in a little bit more detail: Could you talk about the end of the book? Because you two do list some really great outside resources, besides the book itself, and then you also list a large list of hobbies and activities. Can you talk about what resources are back there?

[0:42:12] BH: Fortunately, I have a copy of the book at my fingertips.

[0:42:15] DA: Perfect.

[0:42:16] BH: The way we set it up, appendix A is basically just, it’s where to go if the item that we mentioned in the text intrigued you and it’s got a footnote so that’s to get people out on the trail. Then appendix B, we mentioned further resources worth your attention. This was stuff that Ted and I picked up along the way, some of it we came up with, some of the people said “you ought to include this.” That includes some books and websites and I’ll just pick the first one is one of my favorite books of all time by Marcus Tullius Cicero called How to Grow Old: Ancient Wisdom for the Second Half of Life. This was written in the second century A.D. but it is a kind of timeless counsel. Then we mentioned some websites. There is an organization, a website called nextavenue.org and it’s fascinating because it was set up by the public broadcasting folks out in the Twin Cities. They put together a website, and blogs, and the like, to help people - I think their target is 55 and over - to help people think about how to have a satisfying life. It’s called nextavenue.org, and then I think the last time I checked, they had over 75 million hits. Then, the last one is potential retirement activities and this - I’ve got a lot of feedback, I think Ted has too from people who’ve gone over the manuscript because they love it - it is a list of all of the different things that people, that we ran into along the line, potential retirement activities. And so, when you’ve got somebody sitting there thinking, “Oh my god, what am I going to do?” they can go to appendix C and I think it’s - two, four, six - six pages of things that people do in retirement. And it’s just to stimulate their thinking from everything from working in the wine store, to being a tutor, to traveling, special kinds of travel, et cetera. Those resources are there and then, the simple fact today, Drew, is that anybody who’s got a keyboard and a computer can do extraordinary research using the web, and just tracking down things and, you know, finding out what’s behind a place to visit or what’s behind a certain kind of work or anything you want to know. You know, all - as my son reminded me recently - all the knowledge of mankind is at your fingertips except what’s going to happen next week.

[0:45:12] TK: I think you’ll find when you go through each one of these sections it’s kind of like a chocolate chip cookie: A little advice, things like chocolate chips spread throughout the book of places you can go, websites you can go to, people you can talk to, books you can read and then, also obviously the thoughts that Bruce and I collected, which are 99.9% from what people have told us they did and how their experience was. I think it’s designed to be, as Bruce said earlier, it’s a workbook. I mean it’s designed to be something that you can pick up and then, by going through the book, find which is the best path for you to determine how you have a successful retirement.

[0:45:56] DA: Well, Ted and Bruce, I know we just touched on the surface of the book here, but I want to say, you know, writing a book like this, which is really going to help so many folks make the right decisions before retirement or during retirement is no small feat, so congratulations on being published.

[0:46:11] TK: Thank you

[0:46:13] BH: Thank you and I would add one last point and that is that any money that comes from this book selling is going to charity.

[0:46:22] DA: That is such a great fact and I’m so happy that you mentioned that and, you know, this has really been a pleasure and I’m excited for people to check out the book. Everyone, the book is called Retiring and you could find it on Amazon. Ted, Bruce, besides checking out the book, where can people connect with you?

[0:46:39] BH: Well, we have a website that’s in development with Scribe right now, and our website name, the address is www.retiringyourlife.com, all one word, retiringyourlife.com.

[0:46:59] DA: Well, thank you so much for coming on the show today, and best of luck with your new book.

[0:47:03] BH: Thanks, Drew. Thanks, Drew.

[0:47:05] TK: It’s a real pleasure.

[0:47:07] DA: Thanks for joining us for this episode of Author Hour. You can get Ted Kaufman and Bruce Hiland’s new book, Retiring, on Amazon. Also, you can also find a transcript of this episode and all of our other episodes on our website at authorhour.co. For more Author Hour, subscribe to this podcast on your favorite subscription service. Thank you for joining us, we’ll see you next time: same place, different author.