#32 Career Pivot: How to Change Careers When You're in Your 50s

Are you in a career that matches your God given talents? Most of us are in careers that we were trained to do. Not careers that centered on our talents. After college, we start work and our careers generally progress on their own without much intentional direction from us. If you're in your 50s and this fits you, it's not too late to begin to pivot your career towards something you have natural talents for. In this episode, Career Pivot's Marc Miller outlines how to start your pivot.

INVEST WISELY: Things to Consider Before You Buy Alibaba

Interesting. Over the last few days I've heard more people talking about the blockbuster Alibaba IPO than the new iPhone 6. As a result, I've gotten more than a few inquiries asking whether Alibaba is worth buying. Now, I would not dare to recommend the purchase of any investment on this blog. That would be silly. I know nothing about you or your situation. In fact, please RUN from any site that makes such recommendations.

If you are considering buying Alibaba stock, ask (and answer) yourself these questions:

Are you gambling or investing?
If you're gambling, treat it as such and make sure you are only using excess funds that you can afford to and are willing to lose.
If you say you are investing, then do your homework and evaluate for yourself:
- Is Alibaba a well run company?
- Is it profitable?
- What is the competitive environment?
- What is the regulatory environment?
- Does Alibaba have a solid balance sheet (that can survive growing pains)?
- Are you paying a discount, premium or fair value for the projected growth?
- What is your exit strategy?
- How does this help you Retire Well?

PLAN WELL: Doing What You Love: A Conversation with Marc Miller from careerpivot.com

Marc and I discuss:

The origins of the “retirement” concept and why it’s outdated
How Baby Boomers' view of themselves is changing the concept of retirement
The importance of having a purpose during retirement
How the social contract has changed between employers and employees
How to pivot your career even in if you’re in your 50s
The difference between skills and talents
How to make the transition from doing what you’re trained for to doing what you love
The importance of relationships in your career pivot
The value of simplifying your life as you pivot

You can connect with Marc at careerpivot.com

Question: If you're in your 50s, do you plan to work during retirement? Let me know on Twitter.

Tweet to @roger_whitney

[spoiler]

The Retirement Answer Man Episode #32

Well, hello there! This is Roger Whitney. I am the Retirement Answer Man and this is the show dedicated to helping you live well today without sacrificing your tomorrow as you walk that journey into retirement. What a great thing that would be to find that balance.

To help you along the way, we have two great segments today.

In our Plan Well segment, I talk with Marc Miller. Now, Marc is from careerpivot.com and a 22-year IBM veteran. He counsels Baby Boomers on how to find that vocation, that job, that business, that second or third or fourth career that they can work on their own terms throughout retirement, earn a good living, and stay intellectually engaged, and what a cool thing that would be if you can find that. So, it’s a great conversation to have with Marc.

And then, in our Invest Wisely segment, I talk about all things Alibaba – the Chinese internet eCommerce company that came public late last week and is now the largest IPO or initial public offering in the history of Wall Street and the financial media is going crazy about it. So, I’m going to give you some questions you should ask yourself before you decide to jump on that bandwagon. So, we’ll talk about that.

You can find me on the internet at rogerwhitney.com and on iTunes at The Retirement Answer Man. If you enjoy the show and you find value, go to iTunes and leave a review. That would do a lot to help increase the visibility of this show and have more people join the Plan Well community so I would really appreciate that.

Well, before we get started, let me turn this music down as I always do for that all-important disclosure. And that disclosure is you need to think of this podcast, my blog, and really anything on the internet as helpful hints and education because none of us know anything about you so don’t take recommendations from people that don’t know you. Think of it as education and helpful hints, and make sure you consult the people that do know you – whether that’s your tax consultant, your legal advisor, your financial advisor – before you make any decisions in your life. And that’s just not a great legal disclosure, that’s a fundamental principle of planning well. That’s why I’m always happy to say that and make all my attorneys happy.

All right. Well, let’s get started with the Invest Wisely segment. If you haven’t been paying attention, late last week, Alibaba came public and is now the largest initial public offering ever on Wall Street – larger than Amazon or Facebook or any major company you can think about. That’s pretty amazing if you consider that probably 99 percent of us had no clue what Alibaba was just a week or two ago.

Well, Alibaba is an eCommerce company based in China. Yahoo! owned a large stake in them and they spun that off and took it public just this last week and there’s a lot of buzz about Alibaba. You talk about China, getting access to the China market, Chinese consumers, eCommerce, internet – all the crazy buzz words that really make people excited nowadays in terms of the stock market. It reminds me of the internet craze a little bit back in the 90s. I remember when Netscape came public and then lots of other companies – most of them we can’t even remember nowadays. But that same excitement that I’m hearing about Alibaba, I heard back then.

I think it’s amazing that more people have asked me about whether they should take a flyer with Alibaba than talking about the iPhone 6 launch, and we’ve known about the iPhone 6 for months and Alibaba is this new thing that just happened and took everybody on storm and the financial media is going crazy about it.

So, should you buy Alibaba? Should you consider taking a flyer? Short answer is I have absolutely no idea because I don’t know you and I really don’t know that much about Alibaba, to be honest with you. But, if you’re considering investing or – let me put it this way – buying some Alibaba, I have a couple of questions for you to ask yourself and at least come to some understanding as to where you sit on these.

Ask yourself: “Are you investing or are you just simply gambling on a flyer?”

Now, if you’re gambling on a flyer, that’s perfectly fine. We’ve all done that from time to time – whether it’s buying the lottery ticket or going to Vegas or buying a company that we just heard about. There’s nothing wrong with doing that. But it’s just important that you understand that distinction between gambling and investing. Investing is a long-term behavior where you do a lot of due diligence and you understand exactly what you’re buying and why you’re buying it. So, if you’re accepting that, “No, I just want to gamble on this. Everybody’s excited about it.” It’s gambling. You just want to be part of the movement or the excitement of the day and maybe make some money along the way in terms of investing or buying – excuse me – gambling with Alibaba stock. That’s perfectly cool.

But, just like any type of gambling, make sure you’re playing with money that you’re able to lose, your play money – just like going to Vegas – and money that you’re willing to lose. As long as you are able to accept that “this is just a gamble and I’m playing with money that, if it’s all gone tomorrow, my life will not be affected and my retirement plan will not be affected” then that’s fine. If you can afford to lose it and you want to take a gamble, go ahead – whether it’s Alibaba or anything else.

Now, if you say that you’re investing, now we’ve got a whole different story. There’s a big difference between investing and gambling. If you say that you’re investing, ask yourself: What do you really know about the company? Have you done any due diligence beyond hearing the headlines and reading an article two on Yahoo! Finance or any of the other financial press or media.

If you’re investing, you definitely want to make sure you do your due diligence. Do you know the management team other than the charismatic billionaire that’s been on all the websites saying that they want to be bigger than Walmart? Do you know the management team? Does he have a good structure in place to support the crazy growth that they’ve had? Do you know whether they’re even profitable or not? And, if they are, what’s the growth rate on that profitability and do they have the revenues to support the kind of growth that they’re projecting? Do you know who their competition is? Do you know if the competition is right on their heels? Whether they’re protected from the competition? Do you know what the regulatory environment is for the company Alibaba, an eCommerce company in China, a communist company? Are they protected because of the regulatory environment? Are there risks because of the regulatory environment? Do they have a strong balance sheet? Do they have a lot of cash on hand? Do they have a lot of debt? Do they have a balance sheet that can support the kind of growth that they’re looking at? More importantly, do they have the kind of balance sheet that can support the company through the hard times when they have growing pains? And then, lastly, what’s their evaluation? Are you paying a fair price for the value of the company now and the value of the company or the growth rate that the company has? Are you overpaying? Are you paying a premium for all the excitement and the growth of the company? Or are you getting this at a discount? Or are you buying this company at a relatively fair value given the kind of profits and revenues and growth potential that the company has? You need to be able to ask yourself all these questions and feel comfortable with your answer before you actually invest.

Now, if you’re going to gamble, take money you’re willing to lose and okay to lose and it’s not going to affect you and go ahead. But, if you’re investing in the company, you want to ask these types of questions and have a clear understanding of what your exit strategy is. Now, yeah, I know, it sounds like a lot of work. It is a lot of work if you want to invest wisely, and that’s the point. You’ve got to know what you’re doing and you’ve got to be thoughtful in how you make investment decisions because that’s how you walk that path towards retirement.

Okay. Roger Whitney, the Retirement Answer Man, Debbie Downer! I’m sorry, guys! That’s my thoughts on investing wisely and whether you should buy Alibaba.

Now to the Plan Well segment of today. We’re going to have a conversation with Marc Miller. As I told you in the intro, he is a 22-year veteran of IBM and a serial entrepreneur and career man who now counsels and has a lot of great content for Baby Boomers as they transition away from the corporate environment and explore the idea of finding a vocation or business where they can work on their own terms, earn a living, and stay mentally gauged well into retirement. He helps Baby Boomers figure out and deal with the transition from working for a large corporate and moving into retirement and still being able to be engaged.

So, here’s my conversation with Marc Miller of careerpivot.com.

ROGER: I guess my first question for you, Marc, is: are baby boomers in general doing what they love?

MARC: No. It’s my claim; my mantra is I was raised to be an employee, to go work for a father-like company who would take care of me. And, of course, we all know, about three-quarters of the way through, they moved my cheese, and most of us aren’t going to retire.

The other piece is, most of us, when we left home, we did one of two things. We either did exactly what our parents told us to do or we took what was available at the time. Now, I went and worked for a father-like company, IBM, because that’s what my dad told me to go do. I can’t tell you the number of folks… In fact, the gentleman I was just talking to you about who is now driving trains down in Houston, he got into sales. Why? Because, when he was 25, someone told him, “You know what? You’re a really nice guy. You should get into sales.” And then, he did it for 35 years.

ROGER: Yeah, I’m 47. I can remember coming out of college. I went to Michigan State and grew up in the Ann Arbor area so I had the very industrial auto. The mentality was you just go get a job. Go find a corporate job and you didn’t know why – that’s just the next step.

MARC: That’s right. What’s happening is, like I say with my one gentleman, he was in sales. Well, sales has changed pretty dramatically in the last 15 years. By the way, I’m seeing this over and over with baby boomer sales people. You know, so much has gone online; much less of the personal touch and relationship building.

And so, what’s happened to a lot of us is either our professions are kind of disappearing or our industries are disappearing, and these are things that we thought we were going to do over and over and over again for our entire career. So, you know, most of us, when we thought about going and getting that job, it was to put food on the table, put our kids through college, pay the mortgage. It wasn’t supposed to be fun. It was work!

ROGER: Exactly, and your fun was outside of it and there was a line between the two.

MARC: That’s right. Of course, what do we do with our kids – the millennials? We raised them to “follow their passions.”

ROGER: And that pays so well. I’ve seen that with clients’ children.

MARC: Oh, yes. So, yes, it’s rather interesting. A lot of generations – I call them “generational eco-effects” – each generation will do either the same thing their parents did or do the exact polar opposite.

ROGER: So, for example, in my practice – and I deal with people that are on that pathway to the “standard retirement” or what they think is a standard retirement – that’s pretty scary because they think of it as an on-off switch that “I leave work and I am retired.” They know what the stereotypes are but they don’t even really know what that means. They just know they’re supposed to do it – just like you’re supposed to get a job out of college.

MARC: Yeah, it’s rather interesting. Retirement, I think I listened to one of your earlier podcasts that retirement is a really new-fangled thing and the way I like to put it is, in January 1, 1960, there was a great visionary – a guy named Del Webb. He opened Sun City with five model homes and a strip mall. On day one, he had 10,000 cars outside of Sun City, Arizona. Everyone thought he was nuts. It wasn’t until the 50s and 60s when Arizona and Florida started being developed that the concept of the Golden Years started to be created. By the way, that was my parents.

ROGER: Right.

MARC: Now, the way I like to say it is, “Okay, of those people driving into Sun City on January 1, 1960, how many of those do you think smoked?”

ROGER: A lot!

MARC: Probably a lot. They didn’t live so long. The other piece is, you know, we’re going to live a lot longer than our parents and one thing that’s been told to me over and over again by boomers is we do not have the same view of ourselves at the same age as our parents.

ROGER: Definitely.

MARC: My wife turned 60 the other day. I guarantee you she has a very different view of life than her mother or my mother had at the age of 60. We don’t think we’re old yet.

ROGER: And you have a lot more to give – not just in terms of work output but whether it’s give back to society or expression of talent or whatever else it is.

MARC: Yes. I think one of the things that I tell people is, “If you think you’re going to retire and do nothing, you’ll die.” I mean, you need a purpose. Now, the reality is about 80 percent of my demographic are not going to be able to retire as planned because the number that was quoted to me was, if you’re a married couple and 65 today, there’s a 72 or 75 percent chance of one of you living past 95.

ROGER: Yeah, the numbers just don’t work because everything’s changed but the planning community hasn’t really caught up or the stereotypical planning processes haven’t caught up with the new realities – at least that’s my view.

MARC: Right. The other problem is the fact that, in this last great recession, if you were a boomer and you went unemployed, on average, you went two years unemployed and you were going to get hired back at three-quarters of what you were making.

ROGER: And that’s really the scary proposition. If you’re a boomer and you’re a professional – whether that’s middle management or sales – and this is what I like about your message is, if you’re not thinking like an entrepreneur and always keeping your networks fresh, keeping your skill sets fresh, you’re really in a very vulnerable position and I think a lot of people found that out going through 2007 and 2008. You know, you’re a line item to a corporation.

MARC: Yes.

ROGER: That deal of cradle to the grave that our parents grew up with is gone.

MARC: Yes. I’ve done some blog posts on resource actions and riffs and going, “If you get laid off, it is not about you.” You’re just a cog in a machine. That’s all that it is and you’ve got to get used to that. And so, I’ve had several clients right now who either have been laid off or about to get laid off and I’ve got them forming their own LLCs and starting to look at saying, “Okay, how am I going to do this on my own?” because right now the trend says, by 2020, half of us in this country will be either contractors or freelancers.

ROGER: So, that social contract has totally changed from our parents.

MARC: Oh, yes. And, as I say, you know, I worked for IBM for 22 years. In ’99, they messed with the pension plan. They took it away from me, gave it back, but they removed all the medical piece of it and I went, “I don’t trust you anymore. I’m leaving.” As it turned out, that was one of the smartest financial moves I ever made.

ROGER: I think you’ve answered this question. So, if you’re someone in your 50s, is it really too late to change careers?

MARC: Oh, no.

ROGER: Yeah, I don’t think it is, but I think the perception is, “Yeah, it’s just too late for me, I can’t keep up with…”

MARC: Well, I’m on my seventh career and I claim that we came up with the term “career pivot” because it’s not like going from here to there. It’s making incremental changes. So, like right now, I’m working with a woman who’s been in environmental engineering for 20-plus years. She’s highly creative. She’s sick of it. What we’ve done is we’ve moved her. She’s now gotten a job in marketing in the environmental engineering arena and we’ll eventually then move her out completely out of the environmental engineering arena into something and she actually wants to start her own business. But it’ll be a three- or four-step process.

ROGER: And that’s key right there. That’s where, in my counsel to clients that are dealing with these issues, you see people, they want to treat it like a light switch.

MARC: Right.

ROGER: “I don’t like this. I got that it’s bad. I’m quitting and I’m starting this business,” and that’s like burning your old car before your new car is built in the garage. You’re going to end up walking around a lot of places.

MARC: Well, it’s similar if you’re going to start your own business. Most people – if you’re smart – you’ll start the business while you still have a job and you start it on the side. That’s the attractiveness of franchising which is a business in a box. The first thing you have to understand is who am I?

ROGER: Yeah, and you talk about that when you talk about the differences between skills and talents.

MARC: Right. Yeah. I mean, you have to understand, a lot of us have built a lot of skills. We have acquired a lot of skills and those skills have largely been dependent on what our employers are willing to pay us for. Now, those skills, if they are not tied directly to your core talents, if you overuse them, you will burn out. So, one of the great quotes I used in a blog post was about Larry Bird. Larry Bird said, “A winner is someone who understands what their God-given talents are, works like heck to build skills on top of them, and then uses those to become a winner.” Now, I claim, if you go back to Larry Bird, Larry Bird wasn’t a great athlete. He was slow, he couldn’t jump, but what he could do was I claim he probably had great vision and great hands.

ROGER: We hated him in Detroit, by the way, when I was rooting for the Pistons.

MARC: Well, by the way, I was at Northwestern during the time of Magic Johnson and Larry Bird. We got killed every year by Michigan State. But anyway, the key piece there is he developed his shooting and his passing to become a great player. And so, a lot of us, we end up building a lot of skills and what happens to a lot of us as we get into our 50s, we finally go, “You know what? I just don’t want to do this anymore.” “Oh, but you’re so good at it! You make so much money at it!” “I don’t want to do it anymore.”

ROGER: That’s the trap a lot of people get in. They do make a living at it and it’s hard to imagine that they could do anything else. They feel trapped.

MARC: Yes. Well, how many lawyers do you know are unhappy? I know a lot, because they’re addicted to the money and they’re addicted to the lifestyle and that’s where, you know, if you’re going to go off in your 50s and you’re going to change careers, the likelihood is you’re going to make less money. The key piece here is to figure out what do you really want to go do. I have a client now who’s driving trains in the Houston Metro Rail line. He’s having a blast. He’s 58. He’d been a sales guy most of his career.

ROGER: Use him as an example. How does somebody like that make that transition from sales to trains?

MARC: Well, the key piece here is he had determined that sales was drying up on him and commissions were getting smaller and smaller. He was in light industrial sales and he had struggled for a number of years. He thought he wanted to go become a school teacher. He had an associate’s degree in aeronautic engineering or aeronautic something and he got back when he was in his 20s so he got a pilot’s degree and thought he was going to go into teaching. That’s when he came to me. We picked him apart and basically his top interest was he was a musician. He loves music and he now realized that, well, he can’t make money at it but that’s what he found fulfilling. By the way, he got that fulfilled in church.

ROGER: Right.

MARC: The second piece was he was highly mechanical. I used the Birkman Assessment. It said, “You should be a pilot. You should be a train driver. You should be…” and so he said, “Okay.” He looked at DART up in Dallas, they didn’t have any positions. But Houston was hiring and so he said, “I’ll go apply.” They called him up and said, “Go take this assessment.” He goes, “What’s there to lose? I’ll take the assessment.” Then, they call him up and say, “Can you come down for an interview?” and he said, “Yeah, what’s there to lose?” He studied up.

He found an interesting article about a guy who was driving the trains on the London underground and that’s how he prepped himself. Then, they did a panel interview. By the way, one of the things they made him do was unhook a seat and it had a little trick to it, they wanted to see whether he’d get frustrated with it which he didn’t – he thought it was a fun problem to solve – and then they took him out in the rail yard and he’s going, “Wow! I’m going to get to drive a train! This is cool!” Now, with overtime, he’s going to make about $50,000 to $60,000 a year. His goal is to be a trainer and a supervisor. He can do it into his 60s and he’s having a blast!

ROGER: So, that’s a perfect example of a career pivot.

MARC: Yes. I’ve gotten various other people’s halfway through various pivots and it’s getting down to understanding what makes them happy and then asking for what they want to do. I did a blog post, I’ve got a guy who’s what I call a structured anarchist. He’s a former CFO. He’s very, very orderly – it just has to be his orders. It has to be his structure. So, he’s really good at creating order out of chaos. But once he’s created the order, he wants to get out and because he’s so orderly, he tends to have always been placed and put in places that were very rules-oriented. If he couldn’t change it, he’d get frustrated and leave. So, now he understands that and he’s now out of finance. He’s working on building sales channels and he has fun doing it.

ROGER: I guess the first key if you’re a baby boomer or really anybody when you’re planning, I hesitate to use the word “career” or your work life, is to open your eyes and say, “I’m not too old to do something else and it’s not too late for me to discover what my talents are.” The first thing is to be willing to start that journey and figure it out.

MARC: Right. I always claim step one is know thy self. Most of us have morphed our behaviors over the years for our employers to make ourselves look like how our employers want us to look. So, I’ll use the example with myself. My Myers-Briggs, I’m an ENTJ – it says I’m an extrovert. No, I’m not. I’m a closet introvert. That’s a learned behavior. One of the things I got out of the Birkman and I absolutely adore the Birkman – I use it with all my clients – is how you appear is one thing but how you want to be treated in return is a whole different.

ROGER: Okay. I’ve taken the first one, I haven’t taken the second one – the Birkman.

MARC: Yeah, the Birkman is all science-based. It’s been around since the 50s and that’s the big difference and it’s where you’ve gone and morphed your behavior, and some of this is society, some of it’s for jobs, some of it is just the way we were raised, we were told. I’ve had one client who was hypercompetitive and it was beat out of him by his dad. But you know what? He wants the pay raise. He wants to get the bonus check and, throughout his career, he’s never asked for it.

ROGER: So, I guess the first step, once you open your eyes and say, “Okay, I can start exploring this.” I’ll liken it to you’re driving a car around and it’s not really your favorite car. As soon as you open your eyes of the possibilities of what you could be driving, then all of a sudden you start noticing things that you never noticed before.

MARC: Right.

ROGER: And that’s part of that journey of “Hey! I could be in that car. I could be in that career or in that job.” And then, it’s a matter of figuring out what fits you – whether it’s taking these scientific tests or hiring someone like you to help shepherd them along the path.

MARC: Well, the key piece is your next career and job will come through a relationship. We are in such a connected world now that the point is to get out and start asking for help – something us guys don’t like doing.

ROGER: No, I don’t need directions; I will find my way by myself.

MARC: That’s right. And going, “Okay, this is who I am. This is kind of what I want to do. Who can help me get there?” and I call that building your tribe. The science says you can have about 150 relationships in your life maximum and I call the 150 are those people that you can reliably go to and ask for a favor and it is likely to be granted. So, who’s in your tribe? Who needs to be in your tribe? What part of that tribe has to be your fan club? i.e. those people who are just going to go cheer you on because, you know, “Roger, you’re doing okay!” By the way, different personalities need different amounts of fan club. I went off to teach high school math for two years late in my career and, if I didn’t have my fan club, I could have not made it through my first year.

ROGER: Really?

MARC: Oh, yeah. I had people cheering me on that gave me moral support – without it, I wouldn’t have made it through the first year. My first year teaching was hard.

ROGER: And then, the opposite of what you just said, if you’re in your 50s and you’re starting to open your eyes and starting to explore, you need to have your fan club in the opposite of that. What I’ve found is I need to start being more selective of whose voices I allow in my life because there’ll be a lot of people that don’t want anybody to change around them.

MARC: Yes. I mean, one of the firs things I say is the first thing you have to do is get your family on-board. I’ve had a number of clients who have stopped because the wife didn’t want to give up income. So, you kind of have to align things. I talk about giving up stuff. We’re addicted to stuff.

ROGER: Yes, we are.

MARC: And so, we’ve downsized into a condo. There is no bedroom for our son to boomerang back into.

ROGER: That solves that problem pretty quickly.

MARC: It solves the problem. We got rid of the family house and we’ve greatly simplified our life and we’re living on half the amount of money we used to.

ROGER: I went through a similar thing ten years ago when we started our practice and of downsizing and didn’t lose an ounce of happiness – probably ended up being a lot more happy.

MARC: Yeah. Well, when we sold the house, I decided I wanted to give everything away and we went from a 1,700-square-foot house into a 1,000-square-foot condo. You know, no more yard so I gave all the yard stuff away. That was good. You know, it felt good. And so, you know, it was interesting. I found my dad’s World War II discharge papers as I went through my mother’s stuff and I found some real interesting things that I wouldn’t have otherwise, but it was very much of a cleansing process that was very enjoyable.

ROGER: Okay. Now, your book – Repurpose Your Career: A Practical Guide for Baby Boomers – does that outline a lot of what we’ve talked about today?

MARC: Yes, there are 17 chapters – each chapter has action steps at the end to kind of guide you through. It has been referred to as a training course. Well, I spent about 30 of my 36 years in curriculum development. In fact, the second edition of the book which will come out the middle of next year, I’m going to be building an online course on the back-end of it.

ROGER: Awesome.

MARC: I think I’ve got 39 reviews on Amazon and several of them say, “Wow! This is a training course.” I don’t call myself a coach because I call myself a career designer because I largely teach you my methods. In my seven career changes or in my seventh career, sixth career changes, I’ve made every mistake possible. You know, I’ll use the class example “Don’t base anything on assumptions.” When I left high tech to go teach high school math – and I did that after I had a near fatal bicycle accident – I assumed that the school systems would want me. I mean, I’d been teaching adults for 20-plus years. I’d done it in 40 different countries. Of course, they’d want me! I’m an engineer. I’m going to go teach math. No, they didn’t want me. I was a male over 40. We don’t do what we’re told. I mean, they want very compliant people and we’re not compliant. I assumed, when I got my teaching job, I would just simply take the school district’s health policy, health insurance. It would insure my son, my wife, me. My outer pocket expense was double my cover payment.

ROGER: Wow.

MARC: It was like, “What?” It was because, you know, we were school teachers. There were women of child-bearing ages – the most expensive demographic to insure. So, I made a bunch of assumptions and I learned I’ll never do that again.

ROGER: Okay. So, step one is really to probably go to your book and use that as a guide. How do people connect with you or read more of your materials or work with you directly?

MARC: Well, you go to careerpivot.com. My blog is on the Forbes Top 100 career website list and one of the only one the list that focuses on baby boomers which I found very interesting. I blog three times a week so you can just go up there, subscribe to my blog, and I’ve got four white papers out there – Personal Branding for Baby Boomers, Baby Boomer Manifesto which is don’t retire even if you can.

ROGER: Amen to that.

MARC: I also have a multigenerational workplace white paper and – gosh, my mind’s gone blank – Strategic Networking.

ROGER: I’ll put links to all of these resources on my website on the show notes for this. I think that last (00:35:26 unclear) you said and that’s something I believe, very true. In my 23 years of planning with clients and walking this journey into retirement, I have maybe one person that actually doesn’t do anything – whether it’s volunteering and giving back or working for pleasure – and still earning an income or creating a business because it was their passion and their talent rather than the skill and the framework. So, I definitely agree with you there.

Marc, this has been awesome. Thank you so much for joining me today.

MARC: Well, thank you for having me.

Well, thank you so much for joining me for this week’s episode of the Retirement Answer Man. This is the show dedicated to helping you live well today without sacrificing your tomorrow.

Until next week, plan well and invest wisely.