Are You Heading for Retirement Heaven or Hell?

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Are you well-prepared for the transition to retirement and the life you want to lead? It’s one of life’s major transitions and it takes much more than money. Our guest, Mike Drak, shares his insights from his personal experience with his retirement transition and his recently released book Retirement Heaven or Hell.

We discuss:

The lessons from his retirement transition
What’s changed about retirement since he retired in 2014
The different stages of retirement
How someone can get to Retirement Heaven and stay out of Retirement Hell
How people find purpose in retirement
What the pandemic taught him about retirement
How people can foster new social connections and find their new tribe in retirement
His advice on planning for a great retirement

Mike joins us from Toronto.

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Bio

After a thirty-eight-year career within the financial services industry, Mike Drak experienced what he has now termed “retirement shock”. As a result, Mike spent the next 6 years doing research about retirement which resulted in his best-selling book “Victory Lap Retirement” based on his realization that full stop retirement doesn’t work for most people.

He most recently released “Retirement Heaven or Hell: Which Will You Choose?” which shares some of Mike’s personal experiences in retirement and highlights how people can design and transition to their own unique retirement lifestyle. This book also outlines the valuable retirement lessons learned from the pandemic and introduces nine retirement principles that can support creating a long, healthy, and fulfilling life.

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Wise Quotes

On Purpose & Attitude

“The biggest one for me was finding purpose, finding a sufficient purpose in retirement, so I wouldn’t get bored and I wouldn’t get frustrated, and I had a good reason to get out of bed in the morning. That took a lot of time. That was probably one of the most important ones, but there are other ones too that are equally important. If you think about the importance of relationships, that’s the key factor in focusing on your health, because without having good health, it doesn’t matter how much money you have, you’re not going to enjoy yourself in retirement. And having a good attitude is so important. It all comes down to how you look at retirement and what you think about it. If you think retirement is going to be great, odds are, it will be. But if you look at it as a terrible period, when you’re going to get old and it’s going to suck, well, guess what? So those are important things that I had difficulty with myself.”

On Planning for a Long Retirement

“People…think when you retire, you’re going to be the same person for 30 years. You’re not. You’re going to keep continuing to change and you’re going to keep becoming a different person over time. And it’s important to understand that and to know what kind of person you want to become because that’s where you’re going. And it’s still becoming someone different than you are before you retire. So you want to be able to sit down and say, okay, this is the kind of person I want to become. This is the lifestyle I want that person to enjoy and start putting those things in place because you’re setting yourself up for a 30-year payoff. And you got to do it right. And it’s, that’s why I say it takes a lot of planning, proper planning.”

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For More on Mike Drak

Retirement Heaven or Hell

Victory Lap Retirement

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Podcast Episodes You May Be Interested In

The Skill Set for Life’s Transitions – Bruce Feiler

From Finance to Becoming an Author – James Hockenberry

Believe In Yourself & Try Something New – Carol Cooke

Some Kind of Heaven – Lance Oppenheim

Who Will Take Care of You When You Are Older? – Joy Loverde

Successful Aging – Daniel Levitin