Books on retirement

I'm going to make sure that those gloriously empty days of January offer some pleasant hours for reading, and near the top of my stack are the two books I bought last fall about retirement. I've haven't had much time so far to get into them deeply, but I think I will like both of them. One is What Color Is your Parachute? For Retirement, by John E. Nelson and Richard N. Bolles. Back in the early 80s I had bought an book by Bolles entitled simply What Color Is Your Parachute? I found it tremendously helpful. Aimed at people who were considering a career change, it included questions and and instructions for making lists, to help the reader explore their skills and talents and preferences. Although my usual tendency in a book like this is to read the questions but not to put much effort into answering them, with this book I did them all. I still remember many of the questions. "What have you taught yourself how to do in the past year?" was one. I remember being surprised, once I thought about it, that I had actually learned how to do a number of things on my own. "What do people tell you that you are good at?" was another, and "In your perfect job, what sort of tasks would you have to do very seldom?" was another. A final assignment was to write out the specifics of my dream job: What would be the location, the work schedule, the type of supervision, the main duties, the duties that would be required seldom or never, the remuneration, and so forth. After doing all of that, I went out and found a job that was pretty close to the dream job I'd described.

So when I discovered there was a retirement version of the book with Bolles' name on it, I bought it instantly. Bolles seems to have moved on, however, and Nelson is the main writer of this version. Bolles wrote the introduction and said his contribution is "to frame some of the questions and challenges during this period." I hope that Nelson has carried on in the same spirit and that this book will be as valuable to me as the earlier one. Stay tuned and I'll share as I get time to read it.

The other book I bought is called Super-Charged Retirement: Ditch the Rocking Chair, Trash the Remote, and Do What You Love, by Mary Lloyd. It also contains questions and instructions for lists. I've done some flipping through the pages and I think I'm going to find it quite valuable, maybe even more so than Parachute. I'll dig into it soon and start passing on whatever nuggets I find.