There’s six pillars of an epic retirement
This is the first full edition of the Epic Retirement International newsletter. So share it with your friends, and see how you can make your retirements more epic.
For those of you who’ve found me via the rapidly growing Epic Retirement Club you might be wondering what all this Epic Retirement palava is about. Well, How to Have an Epic Retirement is a book I published just over a year ago in Australia that remains #1 bestselling retirement book in Oz today; and #2 bestselling self help book by an Aussie author. I’m preparing a new, specially-curated international edition, in time for Christmas that’s more suited to people living in the UK, US and beyond. I’m excited, because when you look more deeply at it, the framework works everywhere in the western world to help us navigate these, the years we should be most excited about in life.
So, welcome. I hope you enjoy reading it! You can find the archives anytime at international.epicretirement.net.
The Australian edition of How to Have an Epic Retirement is on sale as a Kindle edition in both the US and the UK right now. It’s US$9.99 and UK£3.99 on Amazon.
Here’s the links:
There’s six pillars of an epic retirement
How to Have an Epic Retirement is built on a six-pillar framework that frankly frames modern retirement really well. Let me talk you through it. Maybe it’ll help you with your planning.
Pillar 1: Time
The first pillar is time, or understanding how long you might live. To have an epic retirement you need to put the number of years ahead of you in life into perspective. Most of us assume that life is short. There’s a new reality. In the last 50 years most people have gained 15 or more years of life expectancy in the western world. Australians that are 65 today now have a one in four chance of living to 94 for men, 95 for women and 97 for a couple. In the UK, people born after 1971 have a 50% chance of living to 100. Time and longevity is actually the most important first-thing to consider when you start contemplating how you’ll plan for your retirement. If you know you have a reasonable chance of living longer, then you need to lean into it, adjusting every other decision you make, and every plan that you have to fit this picture of a longer life. And you won’t just want to think about your lifespan. You also have your healthspan to consider.
When you consider your time, it lays perspective on who you want to spend that time with and what you want to achieve during it. Are there people that are really important to you in this phase of life that you want to be near, and things that you feel passionate about? We want to identify these early - so we build our plans around them. Time is a crucial consideration, and it sets the basis for many of our goals.
Pillar 2: Financial Confidence
The second pillar is your money, but more than that, it’s understanding how your money will work in your retirement years so that you have confidence when you make decisions. I call this having ‘financial confidence’.
You don’t need to be rich to have an epic retirement, you just need to know how your big financial picture works and have confidence to shape it for your years ahead.
You need to understand your layers of income in retirement – government pension, pension fund income, investment income and income from working. You then need to review your cost of living and lifestyle expenses bringing them into line with your income. You need to consider your asset mix and whether it’s appropriate for the next stage of life. And you need to understand your liabilities and how you can end up owning your own home before you retire, and minimising non-deductible debt that’s not worth carrying anymore.
Your goal through your midlife, wealthy or not should be to put yourself in a position to have the ability to live in comfort in retirement. Of course there’s lots more to talk about in money - from your investment strategy to the legacy you want to leave your children and grandchildren. Each plays an important role in how you live your life over the years ahead.
Pillar 3 - Happiness and fulfilment
The third pillar is your happiness and fulfilment. If you’re going to spend 25-35 years in retirement, you’ll need to consider what you plan to do with your time, and how you’re going to get fulfilment.
Work is not off the table in a modern retirement, but most people want to shift to doing work they enjoy, because it interests them, rather than grind away at a job they hate. Alongside this, it’s critical to build up your epic pursuits – pastimes that you are passionate enough about to keep investing and growing your skills in. It’s also critical to cultivate community activities that you love, that give you a sense of meaning, purpose and belonging, as well as the benefits of social interaction which have been proven to help us live longer.
Pillar 4 - Your Health
The fourth pillar is your health. You can’t have an epic retirement without your health. I mean it. All the money in the world is pointless if you’re stuck in a chair unable to enjoy your life because you’re struggling with chronic disease. So start thinking about three things. Understand the science of modern ageing, and how experts are saying we can slow the physical and mental declines in our healthspan, and look at what you can practically do to help yourself. Think about how you’ll make the right types of exercise and nutrition a fundamental part of your everyday life. And work on your prevention of chronic disease - both with proactive steps to do your government-funded or healthcare-funded checks regularly and by monitoring the right biometrics in your body to see problems as they arise and tackle them quickly.
Pillar 5 - Travel
One of the greatest ambitions of Aussie retirees is to travel the world and caravan around the country, using travel as a stimulus, invigorating them to keep learning and enjoying life. I see the same in many of our Epic Retirement Club members, throughout the world. For most people travel is a luxury activity (even if it’s not luxurious travel), something they need to plan for and build up to, only doing it occasionally and for limited periods of time. So you want to plan for it, and use your money and capability wisely.
So start by building your travel bucket list. Cost it out and put it in order of priority so you can waterfall through it over time. If money is tight, think out the ways you can make it affordable to travel to the places you want to see and experience and start making plans. Nothing happens if you don’t make it happen - so set some goals and work towards them progressively, knowing you’re likely to run out of time to travel somewhere around your late 70s/early 80s, if you’re healthy. Or at least that’s when travel insurers in Australia stop covering us to hit the road - something I’m yet to confirm happens in other countries too.
Pillar 6: Your home as you age
And the last pillar is properly thinking about your home as you age.
When we retire we’re often excited for the here and now, so the housing choices you make can be bold and lifestyle oriented in the first years, but it’s sensible as you reach your seventies to start thinking more practically about where you might want to live, whether you can move into a lower maintenance property without stairs, and how you can be located near healthcare services. None of us want to end up in aged care, in any country, unless we have to. And the best way to minimise your risk of having to go into aged care is by really thinking about where you live as time goes on.
You’ll also want to consider how care in the home works in the place you plan to live. This is the dominating future for care as hospitals become limited in the services they want to offer the ageing, and aged care becomes chiefly for those suffering severe dementia, or at the end of life.
And there you have it – 300+ pages of retirement education boiled down to a tiny overview. The international edition of How to Have an Epic Retirement is coming this year. And we’re going to talk about how to have an epic retirement right here on this newsletter, with an international focus.
Hey there! My name is Bec Wilson, the author of the bestseller, How to Have an Epic Retirement. I’m really active in helping people retire well in Australia, and that’s rippling through other countries now. I’m curious about how you can learn from what I’ve discovered about modern retirement and how I can help make your retirement more epic too.
In Australia, I:
Write a syndicated national newspaper column every week (read it here);
Run a six week get ready for retirement program with pretty darned good reviews (info here - but it’s only Aussie)
Release a newsletter (separate to this one) that is focussed on Australian retirement - read it here.
Host a national podcast that is regularly in the Apple Australia top 200 (called Prime Time with Bec Wilson - listen here)
And I speak at events… for pension/super funds, councils, and companies who want to help people learn about retirement.
I’m having fun watching people flourish knowing how they CAN have an epic retirement.
But there’s more to be done, because as my Facebook Group, The Epic Retirement Club has grown internationally I have been able to see first hand that the problems facing modern retirees are fairly universal.
We don’t know how to think about this new longer, more exciting life when the only life templates we’ve known are for shorter, less epic years at the end.
We don’t know how to put the layers of finances together as we approach retirement, combining government pensions with retirement income streams and investments.
We’ve forgotten how to budget – or perhaps we’ve not had to think about budgeting in this way before.
We have no idea what our purpose looks like after we don’t have to work anymore.
And finally, we are curious about our health, and want to stay in good health for as long in life as we can – but we’re unsure who to believe.
So that’s my mission with our international newsletter for Epic Retirement. To help you have an epic retirement. Nothing more, nothing less.
Thanks for reading. I’d love to hear from you. Pop on over and follow me on Facebook here. And drop me an email on bec@epicretirement.net.
Until next newsletter … make it epic!
Many thanks! Bec Wilson
Author, podcaster, guest speaker, retirement educator … Visit my website for more info about me, here.