welcome to new beginnings with karen dell and i am so pleased to have as my guest bonnie mack araby and michelle on spot care they are two dynamic women who are going to talk to us about life after retirement rewiring yourself and i'm so pleased to have them joyous we're going have a really good time so what i want to know is you both took the step while healthy young to retire what was your thought process around that how did you do it well first of all thanks for having us so we're thrilled to be able to be here and tell our story retiring was something always that my husband wanted to do at an young age so we started out our careers pinpointing the time we'd retire and we put a plan in place it just so happy in that we were lucky enough to follow through with that plan but i was more reluctant  retiree a few years prior so i tried to kind of get myself ready emotionally because i loved work and really loved what i did so i started a process three years before trying to lay out the pieces of things i thought i need an author to kind of retire happy and for me it was a completely different situation i wasn't thinking about retiring i was so challenge that work there wasn't a moment to think about retiring and i knew that i would be in a good position somewhere down the road but like a lot of people there was a change in family circumstances a health issue with an aging parent thousands of miles away and it made that decision easier to say this is where i want to spend my time now  as opposed to michelle who's done a lot of great planning i sort of jumped you know into the fire pretty quickly once i made the decision that my priorities had to be somewhere else yeah and i think for both of you whether you've planned for it or it's suddenly there is an emotional piece that you're speaking about and you talk a little bit about that well we sort of summarize it sometimes with a joking kind of reference and i have adult children and my husband and i like to give people advice and the biggest emotional adjustment for me was the breaking point when i had to say to them you didn't realize people used to take my advice you used to come for me for advice i used to like and welcome my insights and you realize your role has changed and you might have had a very important role in your organization  but you're a very different person in your personal life and that was a big adjustment right and for me kind of my career achievement was such a big part of how i identified and my ego i mean yes i was a mother yes i was a wife but i poor as all three of us have a lot into that career so i didn't want to be the person at the cocktail party once i did retire trying to tell still tell people what i used to be and i want to direct this to you ms show you talked about a few years before what what were your thoughts on me because you are a planner and a master planner at that so you know how did you go about getting prepared ok so what i did originally was make a list of kind of what i would miss from work and what i wouldn't miss now the wooden list is very easy to do would miss the traffic you want to miss long meetings you and miss you know sometimes difficult work situations but what you what mess was it did more difficult was to create so i looked at things that said you know i will list of what i miss and on it was i'll miss kind of the power that goes along with my role miss the earned income every year with that role so you have to look at your list and say ok what does it boil down to and for me a lot of them kind of once you got through the financial boil down to will i be able to do something where i feel authentic and will i be able to do something where i help people because that kind of really charged me up about going to work yeah of course and bunny for you with the aging parent who has a health challenge no real plan other than i need to be there to take care of them are thousands of miles away how did you navigate that i mean i assume at some point you were doing it while working in the you decided i need to leave well you know i think like a lot of us you end up in your work life sometimes being a crisis manager so you really just deploy all the skills that you had while you were working how do you how do you set some priorities how do you manage the multitude of health care issues that you might have and you know really you attack it in whatever way you can to to sort of get through it i think you know one of the things that michelle touched on in wanting something important in her life all of us want significance of some kind we need to be significant and we got a lot of that in our careers if we had roles in where we had a lot of influence you slowly come to realize the more important areas where you've had significance where you've been important and i've always been somebody who is more internally focused anyway i've always judge myself more harshly than other people did i always push myself more more than other people did so it provided an opportunity for a lot of reflection personal reflection about what did i want to do for the rest of my life and i manage through all of those health issues spent the time with my father while i could and while we still had him and it was the best decision i ever made and our research kind of shows that most people have a target for when they think they're going to retire the great majority do end up retiring sooner than that which is why you plan is so important either for health financial or family reasons or a company change most of us end up leaving before we thought we would leave so let's talk about you because you've done research and share more about your research well the point that  up is one with think that people always want to retire at a young age but then work longer the statistics that we found is that people actually end up working or ending work three years prior to their projected the originally projected retirement date we've done also a lot of other research on how people are spending their time how the word retirement has changed from the way that perhaps we would describe the way our parents so out of retirement and now when you look at certain studies that show when people think of retirement they now factor in a part time raul and encore career possibly pursuing that dream as an entrepreneur that they didn't have before so our research is very the research is very interesting in terms of the trends in the u s and we talked about our parents i mean i think a lot of people are going to have the aging parents situation a lot of us are considered the sandwich generation and we are going to have to things like that that are very important to us and will make the decisions that are right for us in our family i think also what we found through a lot of our research is that women in particular  have in this day and age many concerns that they might not have had in the past this is really the first full generation of what i'll call career women women who had demanding roles and meaningful positions and a lot of influence and who are wary about giving up those things that give them identity so which a lot of work around that particular issue where do we get our identity who are we to quote an author who's written on this who are we without our business card absolutely we're happy else but we need time to sort of figure out who that is going to me yeah and let's talk about the impact to the family because you're both as i said in the introduction dynamic women take charge you know you have authority and power as you both reference there's an adjustment but let's and i know you've made the adjustment but how would have been some of the challenges let's really rasher be honest you know what are some of the challenges at home there is the marital dynamic  particularly of both retired or one's working and rang once you know in the retirement but also with children well i think you hit on on a key issue which is that all of these relationships are going to require some examining and some good communication let's take the spouse relationship for instance if you're used to having barely a few hours on a weekend together and all of a sudden you're retired well you're going to have a lot to navigate negotiate what it what is your life going to be like how much time together how much apart do you both have the same expectations about where you're going to live how you're going to live those are all things that it's well worth spending time ahead of time to make sure you're on the same page children are the way is there an expectation that because you're retired now you're the built in babysitter well if you don't want to accidentally fall into somebody else's expectation for you you should be thinking about that and communicating it what is the role you want to play in the lives of the rest of your family and even with friends you're retired now i thought we were going to do more of what we like to do which is x y and z well now it will be is that really how you want to spend your time you're asked kind of hey let's get honest and kind of what happened less retirement in july and i was retiring a few months later in october sorry never it was the first week that i retired and i have a whole pile of all of the places you can go for the day in new jersey it was really funny to go to the condo i figured why not but one of the things that i did the first year that i was retired was trying not to make new committee ments because there's a tendency to think about things you can do versus what you want to do so my husband asked me for one year could we both not take on new commitments he and i were both on nonprofit boards we were going to stay on nonprofit boards so there is you know those original commitments it's very hard to think about yourself in light of what you want to do versus what you're capable of doing and that was an interesting slash freeing experience to realize it's really the first time i can think about what do i want to do and when i retired you know i lost my father after less than a year and then i was suddenly on my own and our arrangements were my husband was going to keep working and the reason he was going to keep working for a while is because i had never been on my own my entire life i was a very young mother i had taken care of other people in my life i honestly didn't know what i liked and what i wanted to do and i just wanted the time to sit on my porch by myself and figure it out and she's got a great port so i spent a year exploring all kinds of different things but not at the pace michel would i spend a lot of time sort of gazing at the clouds from my porch and doing a little writing and a little thinking and there came a point where it was natural to say to my husband ok now your work is getting in the way of my being able to travel but also don't you think you want to join me but i had the benefit of that time because it was something i desperately know i was a mother even when i went to college so i never really having a long time that year was so precious to me and really gave me kind of a good foundation for becoming myself and not just somebody some other somebody style somebodies employer or somebody you know employee no that's great that's great it's a luxury it is because many women may be faced with that the other luxury is that you are both women in the upper echelon of management senior management and as you said michel there's income that comes with that you know deferred that you can act but kick in so for the women viewers who are not as well heeled as the two of you what advice would you have for them it's probably some of the same but you know again you've you've been able to have a little bit of space well if you look at let's think about the millennium goals and then think about the generation x s because we're the boomers and soon will be the x s but on the millennium goals if you look at their time horizon for her retirement it's going to be more years out there for the gen x is they came into the workplace at that time when corporations were changing and dynamics were changing in companies so what i hear you saying is if your kind in the middle of your career how can you think about this why should you think about this why bother to think about this and my thought process as it relates to the things that bonnie and i have been working on is that if you're looking at what you're doing now and you're looking at what your goal is in the future there could be some possible steps you can change or tweak so that that later journey is easier or more on track with what you want there was a colleague that i had love books i love to travel and love to garden and as she moved down her clothes her career she started putting more of her time in those interests and as she retired she became a gardener who then later has written two books about gardening so i could say to those people in the middle time period when you're raising small children you can just about get through the day you're packing their bags for the for school you know there's always you know the the car is broken or you need money for their task thinking about oh what a what will i do you say oh i don't have to worry about that now but really take airing yours of yourself physically and take caring taking care of yourself in small ways and big ways financially as best you can will set you up to give you more flexibility and i think there's an emotional component to this to write it we don't we don't even people like we have an account by background we don't just look at the numbers you know i'm i'm sharing something that i read an old baseball player had said once a long time ago the older you get to be more careful about how you spend your time and less careful about how you spend your money because you always know what's in your bank account and so one of the pieces of advice i would give women who are contemplating is don't be afraid think about what you have to work with adjust your lifestyle if you have to but don't live all of your life for the future link about those things that are important to you and how you really want to live your life and see if there's a way to do what you want to do at the time that you were to do it and some of us i think michelle and i are both similar in that we both had worked really hard all our careers and my whole thing about retiring early as i don't want to  work that hard my whole life and then end up having to worry about am i going to have to buy cat food to live on it you know you get to the point where you know i think i'm going to be ok and then it's an individual decision about what's important to you what are you willing to change in your lifestyle to make it happen whatever it turns out is right for you absolutely right and i talked a little earlier about encore careers or the fact that more people are working part time and still feeling like it's retirement because they can figure out what roles or jobs they it's different maybe then what they have been doing gives them enough kind of income but also gives them a chance to do other things or do the things they love more right and get paid for their passion  yeah yeah and i think there is empowerment in what you're both saying that you know if your income does not afford you that opportunity right now you know take a few dimes and nickels and set it aside pursue your interests don't give up you know yeah sure the person who loved gardening and writing and reading whatever that passion is pursuit right and i think that's important it actually brings us to something that's off topic but his recently in a neighborhood not far from here a student was driving a car early in the morning it happened two weeks ago and struck a gentleman and his dog he happened to be the superintendent of the school district the mayor of this town was you know they had a good relationship and he was texting the guy saying there's a bad accident you know you need to be aware unaware that it was it was you know it was him he was fifty two and in what came to mind about that is and this is totally off script but is that you have to live life each day and i think bonnie you said don't put so much stock in the future and we're reminded of this constantly that you can save for the future you can put things off for the future but you can also be struck with a health challenge and we haven't really talked about that we've talked about it as relates to aging parents you're both very healthy but that is another concern yeah there is there is something i think that comes to any of us who have had health serious health challenges and any point in our life which is a side benefit which  is a ability to sort of crystallize what's really important and it's unfortunate that oftentimes it takes something of a crisis for people to be able to see their clearly it's also i think another another thing that we tend to find from our friends and colleagues that women tend to do which is to not put ourselves first and to not put our own interests first and frankly to barely have time to figure out what that is so i think it's important to take all those elements financial is a piece of it you know your person happiness and your obligations are other pieces of it it's a it's a pretty complex decision yeah yeah definitely definitely so what would have you been doing in retirement we've got me is the you've taken care of your well i've been retired about a year and a half so our first year there was a lot of transition and changes sold our home downsized into a condo did travel and went on trips very interesting trip abroad to vietnam cambodia and hong kong you know when i got back i started a grateful journal just me was you know those of us here in the united states some signs we all lose sight spent time with her my father only ninety three this month i capture a picture every time we're together it's really the opportunity to kind of do the things that you haven't had a chance to do i joined  my husband and i have to do a weekly hiking group we've done kayaking visiting friends just little small trips a day trip it doesn't have to be to an exotic place i've had a chance to work more deeply into the  nonprofits that i'm part of and one of the things i'll also be doing is be doing an adjunct course at a local at a local college once and for some of the things i've been up to wonderful and my have and i have a large extended family all in the midwest so being retired has afforded us the ability to spend a lot of time there where my daughter and the smartest twelve year old resident grandmother let it happen to live and to be part of you know important milestones in life experiences they are like michelle and keith we've done a lot of travel places that we've always wanted to go i'm sort of a lifelong learner person him so it's been thrilling to me to even take advantage of the opportunity princeton gives you two would tandon audit courses there to study things i would have loved to study in college eighteenth century literature how amazing is an opportunity for that for very little money i take writing workshops at the university of ohio which is a well known writing workshop and every summer and you go there although they're ok because we have family and a home there so we try to explore those kinds of things that are a little more creative than maybe my work life or see if i have a right brain i'm pretty sure i do and i'm kind of about bring balance to that so it's been a wonderful opportunity to explore those things yeah and this is a perfect opportunity because i didn't talk about your past titles so bonnie i'm going to int love challenges when you look at our our resumes in terms of projects and how can we tackle this and it's really been interesting to really be at peace with not having to carry around what we used to be  and one of the things that i was most surprised about because you know bonnie talked about the fact that she always pushed herself and was kind of more critical of herself than probably any boss she ever had or or team and with me i always thought well not self starter motivated i'm not focused on being judged because i'm pushing myself would i found remarkable and surprising emotion for me was that i was no longer accountable and i was no longer being judged only basis and i thought to myself wow why did i ever think that was and i mean i knew i would be doing the work every really such a nice freeing experience that i don't think we think about oh we won't be driving to work or we won't be putting the clothes on and we won't be doing that but it's just kind of every cell in your body goes oh this is new experience i have shared the experience with michele that my executive that i worked for had always asked me please please please give me six months whenever you want to retire so i did and he kept that quiet he didn't want anybody to know i think he thought he changed my  mind but in that six months people have said well how did you play and one hundred years that six months i did what a lot of women do i work like a dog and on the last night before i left i'm in my office at eight o'clock at night handing out notes and you should have this file right on by the way don't forget this so i walked out the door having been so fully committed to the job and to an instant sort of almost a completely different universe and i'm off to his guns and i'm you know picking locks i'm taking my father you know to the local you know diner for breakfast right now almost like you stepped into another world and so it was quite sudden for me yeah it was it was it was the path i really chose my there was no time to plan right was make it to the finish line and then go right and what i started to do was i would figure out what percentage ready i was thinking my husband's ready but i'm about forty percent ready and i would do little things like take an art class then and for a lot of women who are as busy as bonnie and i they need a schedule right and and i started planning plugging things in and there were things i looked forward to bon time that's a great note to end on but i want to invite you both back because we haven't talked about your project and your upcoming workshop so would you be willing to absolutely beautiful beautiful