Beyond the Nest Egg – Crafting Your Life Plan

In this episode of the Secure Your Retirement Podcast, Radon and Murs discuss the critical but often overlooked topic of Retirement Life Planning with special guest Dr. Corinne Auman a Ph.D. in geriatrics and author of Keenagers While financial strategies and retirement income are vital, this conversation emphasizes the non-financial aspects of retirement, helping you prepare for not just “how much to save for retirement,” but how to truly live well through it. As people live longer, healthier lives, planning for aging with intention has become essential.

Listen in to learn about the difference between a financial plan and a Retirement Lifestyle Plan, how to proactively prepare for transitions like moving into a retirement community or making your home age-friendly, and how to find purpose beyond work. Whether you’re looking into continuous care, exploring early retirement, or trying to stay mentally and socially engaged, this episode will help you build a vision that goes far beyond your nest egg.

In this episode, find out:

·      Why retirement life planning is just as important as financial planning.

·      The SPIES framework: addressing Social, Physical, Intellectual, Emotional, and Spiritual needs in retirement.

·      When to start planning for retirement lifestyle goals and how to structure your future.

·      The importance of purpose and stimulation after leaving the workforce.

·      Why being on a waitlist for a retirement community is part of smart planning.

Tweetable Quotes:

“Retirement planning isn’t just financial—it’s emotional, intellectual, and deeply personal.” – Radon Stancil

 “We all need purpose after retirement. Don’t wait to plan your next chapter.” – Murs Tariq

Resources:

If you are in or nearing retirement and you want to gain clarity on what questions you should be asking, learn what the biggest retirement myths are, and identify what you can do to achieve peace of mind for your retirement, get started today by requesting our complimentary video course, Four Steps to Secure Your Retirement!

To access the course, simply visit POMWealth.net/podcast.

Here’s the full transcript:

Welcome everyone to Secure Your Retirement podcast. We are excited today because we

get to talk about a topic that I think is something that we all need to talk

about. We all need to make sure that we’re planning for. And so, we have a special

guest. Her name is Corinne Auman and she’s written a book called “Keenagers” and

we’ll talk about what that means here in a moment. But let me, before we get too

far into this, let me just say Corinne, thank you very much for coming on and

talking with us and our audience today. – Thank you for having me, happy to be

here. – So, to give you some context, I think that for the audience listening is

that Corinne actually is a person who helps individuals as they’re as they’re trying

to figure out different health scenarios that they might find themselves in and then

that led her to a whole different place of let’s make sure we plan for it. And

because we work with a very similar group of people on a little different path

sometimes, we thought it would be very nice to have you come on Corinne and talk a

little bit about maybe your background first and then what that’s led you to. So

would you mind just setting the stage here, kind of what it is that you would do,

like if you want to say for a living during the day and what that led you to down

this other path? – Sure, so my day job is as a care manager, and I run a care

management practice where we help people typically when there’s a crisis.

So, a lot of our clients come in, everything was fine until and then there’s been

some sort of event with a loved one either a parent or a spouse and all of a

sudden they need to know everything there is to know about senior care about what

Medicare pays for and does it pay for they’re trying to figure out what kind of

care they can afford whether or not the individual can go home after a hospital

stay just everything. So, they have found themselves in a situation where

someone they love has had a crisis and so they’re very stressed out because of that

and then they also need a complete education in the senior care health care kind of

world and that’s a hard spot to be in because you’re stressed out, you’re trying to

learn a bunch of stuff and it’s really overwhelming it’s one of those situations

where you don’t know what you don’t know until you get there and then all of a

sudden you go, “Oh, I need to know everything.” So that’s where we step in. We

have social workers, nurses, gerontologists on staff, and we can assist a family in

navigating through that whole process. And that’s a typical client. I love it when

we get a client who everything is fine, and they are going, “No, I’m just planning

ahead. I’m thinking about where I want to be in 10 years. Do I want to move into

a community? Do I want to update my home so that it’s senior -friendly? What do I

want to do?” I would say those are about 5 % of my clients.

95 % of my clients are the crisis situation. Gotcha. So, I similar in our

world of, we want to strive to get to where we’re more proactive about

financial planning and retirement planning rather than being reactive. And that’s kind

of what you’re dealing with too. So, um, obviously you’ve been doing this for a

while and you’ve seen a lot of the scenarios where it lets react based off of

reality. Um, and maybe is that what led you to say, well, I would like to flip

this in a different direction. And so, tell us a little bit about the motivation

to write the book “Keenagers” and tell us what that title means to you and kind of

the whole premise of that book. Yeah, so when I started my care management agency

12 years ago, now, I really thought I was going to be working with 40 -year -olds

who were caring for 70 -year -old parents. And I’m really wrong.

I was really wrong because I am working with 70 -year -olds who are caring for 95

-year -old parents. And that experience of seeing what my 75 -year -old or 70 -year -old

adult children are like, they are active, a lot of them are still working,

they are volunteering, they’re entrepreneurs, they’re doing all kinds of stuff. They

are still living full lives while caring for those 90 -something -year -old parents,

and having that experience of watching them and watching who they’re caring for

really made me think, “Boy, I’ve got this aging thing all wrong,” right? I thought,

“By 70 -75, you were the one who needed all the care, and that is not the case at

all. And my background in gerontology, like I have a PhD in this field, and I

thought if I’m so wrong about what older adulthood is like today,

what do all the other people who don’t have a lot of experience working with older

adults, what do they think older adulthood is like? And it’s the stereotypes.

Like most people really believe that the stereotypes that you see in media and that

we’re kind of told and that we see on the birthday cards with the jokes and

things, they really believe that those stereotypes, number one, are true, that it’s

all downhill, that sort of thing. And they also think that that’s what your life is

like at 70. Whereas today, 70 really is part of an extended middle adulthood.

And we don’t have, we don’t have good words to describe how much older adulthood

has changed. If you like just to look up words for older adults, they’re almost all

negative and indicative of some sort of decline. So, the teenager word,

the title of my book, came about because I was trying to write about, let’s think

about aging in this new way, because it really has changed. It’s not your

grandparents’ older adulthood. Things are very different now. You’re going to live longer,

you’re going to live healthier, there’s going to be a lot more time to do stuff. And

there are no good words to describe older adulthood in a positive way.

So, the teenager word, you know, keen means highly developed and it means having a

real interest in something like I’m keen on that. I like it. I’m interested in it.

And I think that really describes what older adulthood is like today.

We have so many more years of being active and engaged and keen on life that we

just didn’t have in previous generations and we need to think about that in a new

way, you know, if you think about older adulthood, it’s as starting at, let’s say

65, you know, when social security was first enacted in the 1930s,

you retired at 65, and the average American lifespan was 67. Today,

you retire at 65. Well, the average lifespan is like 77. And we have Centenarians

people living to a hundred and super centenarians people living to a hundred and ten

then we’ve ever had before so It’s really not your grandparent’s older adulthood

things have significantly changed, and we need new words to describe it Yeah,

well, that’s great. I’m glad you gave us kind of that big picture there, So I kind

of like me as I listen to you talk about this because I think that because I think

that we in our world, we’re helping people plan well in advance. We do talk about

the things you would think about a financial advisor. We are talking about the

financial, the taxes, the estate plan. We do talk about healthcare in the context of

Medicare and those kinds of things. Social security, all those different topics. And

then we have clients that are saying, Yeah, when I’m 70,

75, I’m going to look to maybe go to this continuous care retirement community. Or

like you said, maybe I’ll think about this idea of do I upfit the house or move

to a house that I could age in place there. So, if you had to, let’s just dream

it for a second in, and based on what you’ve, how you’ve written and what your

experience is,

when, and then I want to use two questions here. When do you think that somebody

should really start thinking about this ideally? And then what does that even look

like? Like, what am I supposed to be thinking about? I’m 52. So, I sit here and in

my head, I kind of, I do think about how I would live life out that way, but I

mean, how would you answer that? Like, when and what should I think about? So, I

think everyone should think about it, but I realistically, most people start thinking

about it in their 40s and 50s. I just turned 50 in April. So, I’m having that

experience myself too, right? I’m in this world and I’m thinking, huh, I got to do

this too. But I really definitely in your 50s, you need to start thinking about

What do I want the second half to look like? And not only financially,

financially is hugely important, right? We have to be thinking about how I am going to

make this money last for as long as possible because we are living so much longer.

But also, what am I going to do if I do retire, if I move away from my current What

am I going to do for intellectual stimulation in these coming years?

What am I going to do for social stimulation? Because you don’t realize how much

work gives you those things, right? Like intellectual challenge, social connections,

just all those sorts of daily activities that your brain really needs.

The worst thing you can do for your cognitive abilities is retire and then just do

nothing right play golf never do anything intellectually challenging and what I mean

there is something that makes your brain work right it doesn’t have to be something

you hate but you know learning to play the guitar if you’ve never done

that learning a new language whatever it is that makes your brain actively work,

because that’s what it needs to stay healthy. It is a use it or lose it system

just like your muscles are. So, thinking about early on, what am I going to do in

these next decades to make this go well, right? And plan for it accordingly.

What I see is so many people get to, we’ve told them the story of retirement,

you get to retirement, you’re going to get your gold watch and have your party, and

then you’re just going to like to sail off into the sunset and it’s going to be

amazing. And for most people it is, they’re very happy to get to retirement, they’re

very happy in those first six to 18 months. And then somewhere in there they start

to go, well, this is kind of boring. And what am I,

what, this and this is what I’m going to do for the next three decades of my

life. My mom made it six months. She retired, and she made it six months before

she said, “I got to go back to work,” because she had all this time on her hands,

and she literally said, “I didn’t realize how much I got all my social connections.

All my friends are at work, So I got to go back and that’s the kind of thing

that people go through. They’ve got this adjustment period where they have to figure

out What do I do? Who am I now? That I’ve retired because we all need a reason

to get out of bed we all need purpose to help motivate us to make us want to do

stuff and What is that going to be for you? So, retirement planning is not just a

financial scenario, it is a social, emotional, spiritual, intellectual scenario that

you’ve got to think through and figure out. And as a society, we have not given

people a good roadmap for this. Because this is kind of new, right? It’s kind of

new that people retire, I’m putting that in quotes, and then live for decades

afterwards. So, what do we do with this? Right. Yeah,

and I think we; we try to stress the idea also of not just getting to retirement

or working hard to get to retirement. It’s you work hard because you’ve got, you

need to have goals as far as what you want your retirement to look like and

encouraging people to think ahead and not just try to get there and then figure it

out when they get there. Right. Otherwise, you run into this nary like you talked

about your mom.

So, what does this process look like, this consultative process when someone comes to

you and let’s say more of the proactive person, not necessarily the one that’s

reacting to “Hey mom fell and now everything’s kind of hitting the fan.” So, what is

more of this proactive, I’m trying to get things in place, I’m trying to think

through what or what do I need to be thinking through, what does that look like

when someone approaches you? So, it depends on kind of why they’re approaching, right?

Like if they’re approaching because they are thinking about how I plan for this

retirement, then that’s like a coaching and consultation like let’s work through this

process of the acronym is spies. And this is not my original thing,

but I do really like using it. And it’s thinking about retirement planning in terms

of spiritual, physical, intellectual, emotional and social. Right? So, I’m going to let

you guys handle the financial. There’s no F in Spice, but I’m going to help them

think through and kind of process through where I am going to get all these other

needs met. So that’s one scenario. If somebody is approaching and they’re really

thinking about like retirement living and you know where I want to be then

that’s thinking through do you want to stay at home? Do we need to make

modifications? Do you want to look at continuing care, retirement communities. You

need to get on those wait lists way ahead of when you actually want to move in,

right? So, some of the ones in my area have five-year waits. You need to be

thinking ahead. You don’t want to wait until, “Hey, I’m ready to move tomorrow.”

That’s too late. But if you’re going to do upgrades to your house to make them

senior friendly, you need to do that way before you actually need them. Because the

last thing you want to do is be coming home from the hospital after you’ve had a hip

replacement and going, huh, now I need to do a home renovation. Let me live through

that in this house while I’m here. So, thinking ahead to these things to go,

what do I ultimately want my day -to -day life to look like? And then how do we

put the things in place so that when that moment comes, we’re ready, right? We’re

ready to move or the house is all set, whatever it is. I think way too many

people just go, “Oh, I’ll deal with it when it’s time.”

Yeah. By the time you think it’s time, it’s too late. Yep. So,

you know, I don’t, I kind of, this is the way my brain works is I kind of start

thinking about what it is. So, I mean, we talk about all the time we have a

retirement focused financial plan. And I really kind of think, you know, we try to

say, because you could go get a financial plan when you’re 30, right? But, but the

retirement focused financial plan is really kind of saying, I, this is all focused

around this. So, I kind of feel like what you’re, what you’re describing is kind of

a retirement focused life plan, meaning how am I going to live life? How am I

going to, what is that life going to be and then how do I put that together? Um,

and I kind of see that as something that I didn’t document the same as I would

document the financial part. So, I’ve kind of got that plan laid out. Um, well, let

me ask you this, what is a, what is the resources are away? Cause I know you’ve

got your book. I’m a, uh, you, you’ve got, uh, you told us about a website. Could

you kind of walk through if a person’s listening to this and they go, man, I would

like to have this conversation, or at least I want to read about it. I want to

get a little bit more information, how would that, how would, what’s the best way

for them to do that? – Sure. So, I have my website, which is just my name,

CorinneAuman.com. And on that, you can find links to the book. You can find links

to my speaking and coaching material and you can reach out to me through that

website as well. – Okay, very good. Do you have anything else, Marcia? – Well, I was

just going to say, and I don’t, we were talking a little bit before We started

recording this and you said you’re working on another book. So, I don’t know if you

want to give people a little teaser into what the whole premise of that one is in

a couple of minutes here. Sure. So, well, when I wrote the first book, I got a

lot of people who said, okay, I get it, I understand I’m in, I want to do this.

And then they wanted a, like how to, how to do this planning, how, you know, like

almost like a workbook, that kind of thing. And I’ve, I’ve been working on that.

So, the next book, I don’t know if this is the title for sure, but it’s kind of

life as a teenager, like how do we plan for this? And so, it’s going to be kind of

my journey too. Like I said, I’m right here with everybody else going, how am I

going to make this what I want it to be? And so, it’s going to be this sort of how -to

manual for planning your life if you want it to go really well as you age.

All right, well, that sounds really nice. So, Corinne, I just want to say thank you

very much for coming on. I think it’s been very insightful. I’ve enjoyed the

conversation and I think as we know that our audience, they think about these

things. I just don’t know that we have the tools out there, so I’m glad that

you’re working on this to help us have the tools to do this planning. So, thank you very much for coming on and chatting with us today. Yeah, thanks for having me.