By Anna M. Rappaport, FSA, MAAA
Recently, I shared with you information about an interesting book focused on the third age — the time after retirement. Another very interesting book, from the Transition Network and Gail Rentsch, is Smart Women Don’t Retire — They Break Free. It provides stories and anecdotes about the decisions women make about activities, mission, purpose, and working in the third age.
Smart Women Don’t Retire discusses how friendships change and how to make new friends in retirement, as well as how retirement affects partnerships with spouses. The chapter “Why Is My Partner Driving Me Crazy?” provides an excellent checklist to help you and your spouse prepare for retirement together. This checklist gets you thinking about some of the issues spouses face, including goals and dreams, household chores, space to pursue individual and joint activities, money, use of time, and so on. Making sure both spouses have the same expectations is a key issue, and some people have missed the boat on it. Last winter, I talked with a woman who had given up her career to retire and move to Florida with her husband, only to find that while his dreams were met, she was feeling trapped and wanting her career back.
I especially liked the section in Smart Women Don’t Retire entitled “What Do We Mean By ‘Success’?” As in other parts of the book, there are many quotes in this section that struck a familiar chord. For example, a woman named Carol tells us, “I used to measure success by how far up the corporate chain I could go. Today my feeling is that I have been there and done that and don’t feel the need to prove myself in that arena anymore.”
The book ends with a section called “How Do I Get the Most Out of This New Stage of Life?” Like Project Renewment, the book I discussed in my previous post, this section includes a great list of resources and websites. In fact, both books are worth it just for the resource lists.
While Smart Women Don’t Retire includes resources on benefits and financial issues, many other resources are also available on those topics. I recommend the WISER website and the booklet Women at Risk from the Actuarial Foundation. Part of a series of issue papers and other resources assembled by the Joint Task Force on Issues of Women as They Age, the Women at Risk project was prepared with support from the Actuarial Foundation, the Chicago Bar Association, and the Women’s Bar of Illinois.
As an early retiree, I would often tell others that I was “on sabbatical” because I felt less dismissed then when I said I was retired. This was much the same feeling as when, I took time out from my career to raise a family. Then, being a ‘stay at home mom’ was not always thought to be the ‘smart’ choice. Now, in my transition, I’ve mostly gotten over how others think of me and proudly admit to my status as a retired woman enjoying my life to the fullest.
The Transition Network not only produced a wonderful book in “Smart Women Don’t Retire…they break free”, but offer a circle of friendships with a group of smart, intelligent and forward thinking women. We’re all pretty much in the same boat…struggling with a variety of issues, trying to figure out how to make sense of this next stage.