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What happens when successful people are too busy or too distracted to plan for the non-financial side of retirement? Former Senator Ted Kaufman and former management consultant Bruce Hiland saw it time and again with their retired friends. And it led them to collaborate on the new book Retiring? Your Next Chapter is About Much More Than Money. It’s a succinct, practical guide, written in a conversational tone, to help you prepare for retiring beyond financial security. To thrive in your next chapter, you’ll need to be equally well-prepared for the personal and life changes that retiring brings.
We discuss:
- The stories of their (multiple) retirements
- What they noticed about their retired friends – and why they were unhappy
- What’s different about retirement today that changes how you plan for it
- What gets in the way of planning well for the non-financial aspects of retirement
- How to know when it’s time to retire
- What they’ve learned about Identity and retirement
- The role of spirituality and purpose in retirement
- How they continue to learn and grow in retirement
- Their key messages on what you need to know to plan well for life in retirement
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Bios
Ted Kaufman
Edward E. “Ted” Kaufman represented Delaware in the United States Senate from January 15, 2009 to November 15, 2010. Democrat Ted Kaufman was appointed by Governor Ruth Ann Minner to fill the Senate vacancy caused by the resignation of newly elected Vice President Joseph R. Biden, Jr.; Senator Ted Kaufman did not seek election to the office in a special election for the seat in November 2010.
Edward E. Kaufman, known personally and professionally as “Ted,” was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on March 15, 1939, to Helen Carroll and Manuel Kaufman. His mother was a teacher and his father, a social worker, was Deputy Commissioner of Public Welfare. Ted Kaufman attended Central High School in Philadelphia. He received a bachelor’s of science degree in mechanical engineering from Duke University in 1960. The same year, he married his wife, Lynne Mayo, and they eventually had three daughters. Kaufman began his career as a sales engineer in Charlotte and Raleigh, North Carolina, working for the American Standard Industrial Division, which deepened his interest in marketing and business.
Kaufman then pursued a business degree at the University of Pennsylvania where he received an MBA from the Wharton School in 1966. Following graduation, he moved to Delaware to work for the DuPont Company in various technical, marketing, and finance positions. He worked as a technical representative for engineering products in Boston and Los Angeles before returning to Wilmington to work on financial analysis. Back in Delaware, Kaufman became involved in politics.
In 1972 Kaufman volunteered to work on the Senate campaign of Democratic candidate Joseph R. “Joe” Biden, Jr. At age 29, Biden was successful in the first of seven elections to represent Delaware in the United States Senate. Kaufman began working on Biden’s staff full time in 1973, managing his state office in Wilmington. Kaufman initially planned to stay on Biden’s staff for one year with a leave of absence from his work at DuPont. Kaufman stayed on and served as state director in charge of the Wilmington office until 1976 and became Senator Biden’s chief of staff from 1976-1995. From the 1980s until 1994, Kaufman also served as an advisory board member of the Congressional Management Foundation, an organization working directly with staff and members of Congress to enhance operations and citizen engagement.
In 1995, President Bill Clinton appointed Kaufman as a charter member of the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), an independent, federal agency in charge of all U.S. government and government-sponsored non-military international broadcasting. Kaufman’s appointment was confirmed by the U.S. Senate, and he served until 2008.
Also during the period 1995-2008, Kaufman was president of Public Strategies, a political and management consulting firm in Wilmington, Delaware. Beginning in 1991, Kaufman was also active teaching in three of Duke University’s programs: the School of Law (Duke in D.C.), the Sanford School of Public Policy, and the Fuqua Graduate School of Business.
Throughout this period, Kaufman remained engaged with politics. Between 1997-2001, he was the Democratic National Committeeman from Delaware, and during the 2000 Delaware gubernatorial elections, he served on the strategy committee to elect Ruth Ann Minner. When Minner was elected, Kaufman also served on her transition committee. Kaufman continued to serve as a senior advisor to Joe Biden, and in late 2008, he was co-chair of Biden’s vice presidential transition team.
On November 4, 2008, incumbent Senator Joe Biden won re-election to his seat in the United States Senate, but he also was elected Vice President of the United States on the Democratic ticket with presidential candidate Barack Obama. Biden was sworn in to his seventh Senate term, but he resigned his seat on January 15, 2009, and was inaugurated to the vice presidency on January 20, 2009.
On November 24, 2008, Delaware Governor Ruth Ann Minner announced her decision to appoint Ted Kaufman to fill the Senate seat that would be vacated when Biden assumed the office of Vice President. Governor Minner explained that she wanted to appoint someone whose policies closely matched Biden’s. She also wanted someone who would not run in the November 2010 special election to complete the rest of Biden’s unfinished Senate term.
Senator Kaufman’s first committee appointments were on those which Joe Biden had previously served (and also chaired): the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations and the Senate Committee on the Judiciary. In March 2010, Kaufman was appointed to two additional committees: Armed Services, and Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs. His appointment to Armed Services marked the first time a Delawarean had served on that committee.
In Kaufman’s work on foreign relations, he supported international press freedom, public diplomacy, and civilian-military cooperation. His work on the Foreign Relations Committee, as well as the Armed Services Committee, took him on six trips to the Middle East. Kaufman was an active proponent of the Middle East peace process and human rights in Iran, joining with several other Senators to pass the Victims of Iranian Censorship (VOICE) Act, signed into law in July 2009. Kaufman also was co-chair and founder of the Senate Global Internet Freedom Caucus.
As a member of the Judiciary Committee, Senator Kaufman participated on two Supreme Court confirmation hearings for Justices Sonia Sotomayor (2009) and Elena Kagan (2010). As a member of the Senate Impeachment Trial Committee, Kaufman sat on the 2010 impeachment trial of Judge G. Thomas Porteous, Jr., United States Judge for the Eastern District of Louisiana.
Financial sector reform came to be a signature issue for Kaufman. Although he was not a member of the Banking Committee, he addressed issues of too-big-to-fail financial institutions, financial fraud, high-frequency trading, and other market and financial structure issues. Kaufman co-introduced the Fraud Enforcement and Recovery Act (FERA) in April 2009; the bipartisan proposal received broad support and was signed into law. Senator Kaufman was a vocal supporter of reinstituting the Glass-Steagall Act (the Banking Act of 1933) to limit affiliations between commercial banks and securities firms. Kaufman also co-introduced the Safe, Accountable, Fair and Efficient (SAFE) Banking Act of 2010, which would have limited the size of banks.
As the only serving Senator who worked as an engineer, Kaufman was an active promoter of the expansion of education and programs in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). He worked to procure funds for research and extension grants through the 2010 Agriculture Appropriations Bill, particularly to encourage women and minorities from rural areas to participate in STEM opportunities. In April 2010, Kaufman received the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) prestigious President’s Award, presented to companies and individuals who have made significant contributions to the engineering profession.
In October 2010, Kaufman was appointed to the Congressional Oversight Panel (COP). COP, a bipartisan organization created by Congress in 2008, was charged with overseeing the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) and the $700 billion the Treasury was authorized to spend to stabilize the U.S. economy. Kaufman was elected as the panel’s second chairperson, and he oversaw the panel as it conducted hearings, evaluated official data, and released reports. Kaufman served as chair until the committee ceased operation in March 2011.
After his time in the Senate, Kaufman continued to engage with issues, such as financial reform, and write editorials for various news outlets, including the Wilmington News Journal and Forbes.
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Bruce Hiland
Bruce Hiland’s career included McKinsey, more than four years as Chief Administrative Officer at Time Inc., twenty years of independent consulting, and four startups.
Now eighty, he and Ginny, married fifty-seven years, are enjoying their family, dealing with aging, and harvesting the fruits of their labor.
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Wise Quotes
On Denial
” … a friend of mine who I’ve worked with for 15 years now, runs a high-end wealth management office. He sent me an email…two or three years ago. And he said, this book you’re talking about. The title for the book should be overcoming denial. I said, Oh, tell me more. And he did. They work comprehensively with clients [in]basically, what’s called a family office these days. And here they are working on all these financial issues and very, very complex situations. And he told me that at least half of the time, they were unable to get their clients to talk about anything other than these financial, factual things. Getting them to think about what they will do when they weren’t CEO or whatever title they carried, they just didn’t go there and that the conversation was shut down. They’d move right on. They’d change the subject. They’d say, don’t worry. I’m not going to talk about that. So denial is not a trivial factor. My hunch is that denial is more common with people who have been totally consumed by their work, where they’ve just been obsessed with what they were doing.”
On Being Too Busy to Plan & The Bucket List Fantasy
“The next one on the list is they’re too busy. We’ve we ran into this. I think this tends to go with professionals who are doing what they’re doing right up until the day they’re going to retire. They’re too busy. They’ve got stuff to do. They’re too busy [to do] any thinking – serious, heavy-duty, thinking about the rest of their life. Then the next one was the Bucket List Fantasy. Ted and I had some funny anecdotes along the way of people that we’re talking about, people that haven’t retired yet. And what are you going to do when you retire? Well, I’ve got my bucket list, you know, and they go tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, down their list. You’d listen to them. And at first you just kind of listened to them. Then as time went on, you’d listen to them, and start to grin because it would add up to maybe a year and a half to maybe three or four years. And it tended to be travel and big adventures. What do you do when you come home from the trip?”
On Identity and Social Standing
” When you’re in a job, most of us, no matter what our job is, we go to lunch with the people you’re working with. And what do you talk about? We may talk about sports. You may talk about this or that. Most of the time, you’re talking about what’s going on in the organization that you’re in. What’s right. What’s wrong and everything else. And the sad thing is that we heard from so many people after they left the job, they get together for lunch and the first one would be okay, and they talk about the job and they talk about [similar] things in the second one, but by the third one, they didn’t have anything to talk about anymore.
And that’s, and that is, that’s kind of the poster child for this whole overall problem of where your social position is and who you are. There are loads of people [who] wouldn’t go out and do volunteer jobs because how would it look for the people back on the job? If I was doing a volunteer job, [what would they think?] In the book, we talked about one of the best examples I have. There was a man in this case who was a big [deal] high up in his [firm], a lawyer, and he was interested in wine. So he retired and really did what I felt was an incredibly smart thing. He went down to a local wine distributor and he said, ‘I’m really good [at selling]. I want to sell wine – to wine distributors.] And the wine store owner said, Well, we don’t have an opening, we can’t do that, we got all of the employees we need. And he said I’ll do it for nothing. And he was there. Most people won’t do it because they’re worried when somebody walks in and see someone like that, selling wine, It’s like: What would happen to poor Harry? So I think that’s that whole social standing thing is, is a key element in why people are very unhappy about their job, and about their retirement.”
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Buy the Book
Retiring? Your Next Chapter Is About Much More Than Money
(100% of the proceeds from this book will be donated to charity)
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Retirement Podcast Episodes You May Like
Are You Ready for The New Long Life? – Andrew Scott
With the Freedom to Retire, Where Will You Plant Your New Tree? – Don Ezra
When Will You Flip the Switch? – Dr. Barbara O’Neill
The Future You – Brian David Johnson
What Are The Keys To A Successful Retirement? Fritz Gilbert
Who Will You Be in Retirement? – David Ekerdt
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About Retirement Wisdom
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