The Purpose-Driven Retirement

You finally have all the time in the world. So why is nothing getting done?

The first four months of retirement are wonderful. You sleep past six. You clear the garage. You go away on a Tuesday because nobody can stop you.

Then, somewhere around the sixth month, it goes quiet.

Nothing has gone wrong. Nobody is ill. There is enough money. And still you find yourself standing in the garden at eleven in the morning, unable to say where the last hour went - and unable to say any of it out loud, because spoken aloud it sounds like ingratitude.

There is nothing wrong with you. What you are feeling is the most predictable thing about retirement, and almost nobody is warned that it is coming.

This book is the warning, and the way through it. It will not tell you to be grateful - you already are. It will not tell you to fill your calendar, because busyness is only drift with more steps. And it does not begin with your money, because can I afford this? is an unanswerable question until you have decided what this is.

What it gives you instead is six practical steps:

• Understand - why the sixth month hits, and why it is not your fault
• Reclaim - who you are once the job title has gone
• Decide - choose a direction without being told to find your passion
• Structure - turn that direction into a week that actually happens
• Resource - money, health and people, tested against the life you chose
• Sustain - keep it working at seventy-five, not only at sixty-three

Most people reach a retirement that works the long way round - by accident, somewhere between years two and five, having lost a great deal of time they will not get back. This is the same process, done deliberately, in months.

You have earned the freedom. This is how you use it.