OK You Retirement Experts, How Well Are You Doing with Your Own Retirement?
Category: Retirement Planning
April 2, 2015 —
By Jan Cullinane and John Brady
Retirement advice is not hard to come by – it seems like every website and newspaper will tell you how to do it. So we were intrigued when our frequent contributor, Jan Cullinane, suggested a different approach. Her idea was to ask a half dozen retirement gurus to describe their personal retirement plans and rate how well they followed their own advice. We think you will enjoy learning how they went about finding a great place to retire…where they decided to live… the areas where they think they planned well….and even where some felt they didn’t merit an A – in their own class! Note that due to the length of the various responses we have divided this into three articles. This is the Summary.
Comments on "OK You Retirement Experts, How Well Are You Doing with Your Own Retirement?"
Lan Sluder says:
Kudos! This is one of the best articles you've published.
Judy says:
Expert retirees?? How does a person become a retirement expert? Get a BS in Retirement or a BS in BS??
Editor's comment. Great question. You have to have BS, but i am not saying in what! School of hard knocks has something to do with it too. I think all of us have written about it so long we consider ourselves as experts - you be the judge.
John
Jan Cullinane says:
Judy: It is a great comment. Research shows it takes 10,000 hours to become proficient in a field - think Bill Gates and Paul Allen endlessly writing code before founding Microsoft, the Beatles doing numerous gigs in small venues before becoming wildly popular, a master violinist practicing...this applies to the field of retirement as well. These six people (yup, I’m one of them) have dedicated this much time – and much more – to the area of retirement. Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell has an entire chapter on the concept.
OldNassau says:
I retired in southern Florida because o state income tax means I can purchase municipal or tax-free bonds from around the country, not just my state, (Although the income is all yours, medicare counts it when calculating your premiums.) A gym rat, I located near a Powerhouse Gym, a chain which honors Silver Sneakers. An off-road bicyclist, I chose a retirement community near miles and miles of canal maintenance roads replete with wildlife and devoid of cars. And using the "news", not the "web", tab on Google Search, I read about Chinese drywall, defaults, special assessments, that local newspapers (but not the glitzy community website or real estate agent) will tell you about. Yes, the summers are hot and humid, but air conditioning is cheaper than heating. And there are hurricanes - but there are hurricanes all along the East Cost.