Happy retirement requires painstaking planning, Destin authors say

Having enough money for a secure retirement is no guarantee you’ll enjoy retirement, two local authors say.

“If a person is going to be retiring ... they need to give serious thought to it five years or more before that time,” Stephen Carter, Destin resident and co-author of “What’s Next in Your Life?” told The Log. “They have to start thinking about the things they want to do, who they want to spend their time with, where they want to do it.”

While there are many books of financial advice for retirement, Carter and his wife Joan Strewler-Carter wrote “What’s Next in Your Life?” as a guide for retirees to tackle other questions: Do you keep working in retirement? Become a volunteer? Travel? Start a new business? Where do you want to live? How do you keep your social network up?

“If people are behind the curve and all of a sudden, on July 1, they’ve retired,” Carter said, “most people will start out doing the things they would like to do but haven’t had time to do: Playing enough golf, doing fix-ups around the house. (Then), if they haven’t spent enough time planning, they really flounder for a period of time, two, three, six months even a year.”

Carter said he first became interested in career management and life planning while working in the human resources department at Hallmark Cards in the late ’70s. Later on, he founded his own company dealing with career management, outplacement and leadership development.

Strewler-Carter said she has a masters in “current life planning,” and has worked in that field both in her own businesses and for others before meeting Carter, falling in love and joining forces professionally. The Carters co-founded and run the Life Options Institute, which helps individuals plan for life after 50.

“For the last five to 10 years, we’ve been very interested in what happens to you after age 50, partly because we’re at that age,” Strewler-Carter said. “Many of our friends were lost: They’d been successful in their careers, they made good money, their mortgages were paid off, they had a new level of freedom, but they didn’t know how to use it.”

Since the Carters didn’t see themselves as retiring to a rocking chair, Strewler-Carter continued, adapting their career and lifeplanning materials for retirees opened a new field: “We want to do something that would have an impact on our generation.”

Carter said that in their previous life-planning careers, they found that even highly successful individuals with well-laid financial plans for retirement didn’t have any other planning done: “More than two-thirds didn’t want to stay in the job or industry they’re in, but they didn’t have a clue what to turn to and where to go ... You can’t play golf, can’t go fishing every day of the week.”

Strewler-Carter said that retirement gives people a chance to put their life in balance with a mix of work — whether volunteering or paid — exercise, spirituality and time to spend with friends and family.

Carter said it’s just as possible for retirees to wind up overcommitted and stressed as younger people, and that’s a mistake.

“This is a time of life that needs to be fun. I think there are many people who have spent their careers and work lives and haven’t had a lot of fun ... It can be a lot of enjoyment. (Retirement) is not sitting in the back yard looking at an empty swimming pool, it’s being with other people, doing hobbies, things that are meaningful to a person.

For more information, visit www.whatsnextinyourlife.com.