The late, great, George Carlin had this funny routine where he said, “Have you ever noticed that their stuff is s*** and your s*** is stuff”. When we start looking at things in our life that we’ve accumulated, we need to be honest with ourselves: a lot of it is just plain junk.

Retirement is a big life change for everybody. It’s important to try to get clear about it, and I recently came across an article that had three simple questions to ask yourself about what retirement is going to look like for you.

I had a client who was a pilot that was forced to retire at age 60. At his retirement party, he had to go out to get some provisions at the store. He drove to the store, parked, turned the keys to shut the car off, and had a heart attack and died. It was shocking for everyone, and obviously a very severe reaction to retirement. However, we almost saw it coming based on the difficult time he had being forced in to retirement.

In 1889, Otto von Bismarck, the Chancellor of Germany, came up with the idea of retirement at age 70 as a political move. A few years later, the retirement age moved to 65. The word retirement had never been used before in a government sense, it was brand new. Prior to that, people kept living on farms and doing their jobs until they died. They just lived their lives.

Understand generational shifts in hobbies and leisure time before you retire 21 years ago, I was asked to participate at a golf fundraiser for a

Estee Lauder and Peter Drucker. Tina Turner and Tony Bennett. Nancy Reagan and Jimmy Carter. These famous personalities in the entertainment, business, and political arenas have worked well in to their 70s, 80s, and 90s. They didn’t necessarily have a retirement age in mind.