Thrive in Retirement: Simple Secrets for Being Happy for the Rest of Your Life

by Eric Thurman Narrated by Jason Culp

Overview

Discover the three secrets to happiness--and much more--in the later years of life.

Never before in human history have so many people lived for decades beyond their working years. 10,000 Americans turn 65 each day, and their average life expectancy is another 20 years--and many will live longer. But will they just live or have a meaningful life? The truth is that many--if not most--people approaching the latter years do not have a plan, much less a strategy to thrive instead of just survive. Packed with information based on research as well as common-sense wisdom, here are some examples of what readers will discover:

How retiring at the wrong time increases the likelihood of dying 89%.

What can delay Alzheimer's onset an average of 9 years.

How everything that makes you happy comes in just 3 forms.

Which partner is most likely to initiate divorce after decades of marriage and why.

Editorial Reviews

MAY 2019 - AudioFile

Jason Culp’s cheerful narration is a good vehicle for the can-do energy of this empowering guide, but between the lines you can also hear the author’s conviction and determination to be helpful. In addition to Culp’s flinty voice and perfect enunciation, his nuanced phrasing amplifies the author’s humanity, expressed here in the form of colorful stories, many from his own life. Thurman, who is in his 70s, says few people are prepared for the many changes they confront as they move from their mid-60s to their mid-80s and beyond. He shows how paying attention to five key areas—body, mind, relationships, soul, and finances—can help us stay on top of these changes. There are strategies we can use, he says, to prevent ourselves from getting stale or becoming too passive in the way we live. T.W. © AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine

From the Publisher

Whether you are thirty, fifty, or eighty years old, it’s not too late to take Eric Thurman’s advice for a happy, healthy, and secure retirement. With the secrets he offers in Thrive in Retirement, you can enjoy what many of us feel are the best years of our lives! Thank you, Eric, for writing such a great road map!”
—Marilyn and Jim Lovell, astronaut and commander of Apollo 8 and Apollo 13

“Leaving my long executive career was a big change. Thrive in Retirement is a candid and well-researched wealth of information and encouragement on how to not only navigate but thrive in the great third season of my life.”
—Jerry Forte, CEO Colorado Springs Utilities (retired)

“As retirement nears, we encourage older adults to plan for their future financial or health care needs, but what Eric Thurman insightfully notes is that we often overlook the need to plan for what will make us happy. I encourage older adults to use this book as their guide to happiness.”
—Marla Fronczak, MSNM, executive director, Northeastern Illinois Agency on Aging

“Retirement is more than having enough money saved. It is making sure that your finances are taken care of while also planning what to do in your free time, identifying what your passions are, and deciding how you are going to execute those plans after you retire. Eric’s book has it all. I give it to my clients of all ages…to think about as they plan for retirement. Eric, thank you for writing what I think is the comprehensive manual to a happy and prosperous retirement!”
—Mark F. Saran, investment advisor, Lake Forest, IL

“What a wonderful guide for successful aging! In a culture that values youthfulness, this book shows us we don’t have to buy into the stereotypes of growing older. Having worked in the field of aging for over twenty-five years, I found Eric Thurman’s book to be insightful, poignant, uplifting, and practical. As our nation is on the cusp of experiencing the ‘silver tsunami,’ this is a must read—especially for anyone of the baby boom generation.”
—Angel Hoffman, MA gerontology

“Grounded in much insight, Thrive in Retirement is a practical guide to anyone in retirement or considering it. I think everyone over fifty should read it. The book really helps people reflect on their lives and live more purposefully, longer, and happier!”
—Charley Shin, founder and CEO of Charleys Philly Steaks restaurants

“I love adventure, not just in comics, but also in real life. I don’t want my life to be boring, sad, or lack for meaning. Life is meant to be overflowing. I love to use all my potential, not just in my drawings but also in my ministries and leisure times. I expect to enjoy all the years God gives me. That’s why I love Thrive in Retirement. It has a wealth of information on how to make the most of all my decades ahead.”
—Sergio Cariello, cartoonist of famous characters including The Lone Ranger, Batman, Wonder Woman, Captain America, and The Action Bible

“Psalm 92 shares that God’s people will prosper and be like trees that stay healthy and fruitful, even in old age. I encourage you to read Thrive in Retirement, to consider and apply what Eric Thurman shares about abundant living in your later years and finishing this life well.”
—Dr. Roy Peterson, president and CEO, American Bible Society

“In over thirty years of psychiatric care with older adults, we find that social isolation and lack of meaningful activity are common risk factors. As we age, it is how we nurture our relationships and build meaning in our souls that makes the difference between just surviving and truly thriving.”
—Dr. Ken Phillips, psychiatrist, Alliance Clinical Associates, Wheaton, IL

“Thrive in Retirement is a must-read. I found the practical applications in the book to be most helpful, including the online information and especially the checklists. I laugh that even though as a judge and a lawyer I am familiar with many of the checklists, I believe those in the book are very thorough, and I had not considered some of the personal lists.”
—Justice Barbara Gilleran Johnson, Illinois appellate court judge (retired)

“We have not stopped hearing from our congregation since we held a workshop around this book. We had double the usual number sign up. The information is highly engaging, practical, and challenging. It has been a true game changer for our people.”
—Dave K. Smith, executive pastor, Willow Creek Community Church–Crystal Lake

“Having just retired at eighty, after reading Thrive in Retirement, I’m reconsidering! The book is challenging, provocative, insightful, practical, and provides hope for a productive future. I want to grow old as Eric suggests, not merely become old.”
—Dr. Gordon D. Loux, founding president Prison Fellowship International

“This part of life is a big jump and anxiety producing for a lot of people. At the very least, it can be confusing. Thrive in Retirement provides a really nice transition because it is entertaining to read, chock full of information, and very practical.”
—Nancy Barrett Chickerneo, Ph.D., therapist, author, and professor (retired)

“Eric gives invaluable information and advice in this book. I have implemented things he wrote to improve my own retirement.”
—Philip B. Smith, oil industry CEO (retired)

“This book is your pathway to being fulfilled and happy in every step of your life’s journey.”
—James T. Draper Jr., president emeritus, LifeWay

“Eric doesn’t just write about how to flourish in retirement, he shows us how. In Thrive in Retirement, Eric shares from his own life experience to help us make the most of the time we are given. You will be inspired to thrive in this season with rekindled clarity and purpose.”
—Peter Greer, president and CEO, HOPE International

“As someone who has dedicated his life to empowering corporate leaders to unleash the creativity, intelligence, and worth of their employees, I commend Eric Thurman for masterfully carving out a game plan for vital, postretirement years—years that he demonstrates can be entirely productive and fulfilling. In Thrive in Retirement, Eric has written a book that might also be called ‘The Best Years of Our Lives’!”
—Dr. Cleve W. Stevens, leadership development expert, author, and former professor at USC and Beijing University

“Eric Thurman has written a masterful book for older adults who seek to make their years beyond retirement the most fulfilling, creative, and happy time of their lives. A great humanitarian who has enriched the poorest of the poor in developing countries, Eric is now in service to enriching the lives of those hardworking people whose best and most joy-filled days may lie ahead of them!”
—Jeffrey B. Peters, president, the US-Mexican Development Corporation

“Thrive in Retirement provides a clear and compelling case for embracing the third season of our lives with purpose and gusto! Although financial health typically comes to mind for people facing retirement, Thurman skillfully advises us on the power of purpose, pleasure, and peace to fill us with lasting happiness.”
—Dennis Ripley, chief program officer, Opportunity International

“Eric Thurman has written a book that touches every [retirement] subject you may be interested in knowing more about. It’s written in a way that keeps your attention, and it gives hope for our future and tips about how we should view the aging process. I love the word thrive in the title. You may think and feel your age, but this book will give you a new way to think about the truth. Think more about “thriving” and less about “dying” because what we think adds life to our living.”
—Anne Beiler, founder of Auntie Anne’s Pretzels, author, and speaker

MAY 2019 - AudioFile

Jason Culp’s cheerful narration is a good vehicle for the can-do energy of this empowering guide, but between the lines you can also hear the author’s conviction and determination to be helpful. In addition to Culp’s flinty voice and perfect enunciation, his nuanced phrasing amplifies the author’s humanity, expressed here in the form of colorful stories, many from his own life. Thurman, who is in his 70s, says few people are prepared for the many changes they confront as they move from their mid-60s to their mid-80s and beyond. He shows how paying attention to five key areas—body, mind, relationships, soul, and finances—can help us stay on top of these changes. There are strategies we can use, he says, to prevent ourselves from getting stale or becoming too passive in the way we live. T.W. © AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine

Product Details

BN ID:	2940171793067
Publisher:	Penguin Random House
Publication date:	02/26/2019
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

Chapter 1: A Surprising New Stage of Life.
Every day another ten thousand Americans turn sixty-five. On average, all will have another twenty years to live beyond their milestone birthday. Many will live well into their nineties, and an increasing number are passing one hundred. Compare that to the 1800s when the average person died near age forty. Retirement is no longer a short pause between work and the grave. It is now a long, major stage of life, because never before in human history have so many people lived decades beyond their working years.

Growing older is your destiny. How do you feel about what lies ahead? Do you consider it a curse or a blessing? The witty Kitty O’Neill Collins reminded us, “Aging seems to be the only available way to live a long life.”

You probably have healthy, active decades to fill. Yet older adulthood is different from other seasons of life. Will your extra years be inspiring and satisfying?

I have a friend in California who is in his mid seventies and says he’s still getting used to retirement. He built a good-sized business that he was able to sell a few years ago. He is secure financially but says this stage of life is a huge emotional adjustment:

Nobody warned me about this time of life. I thought that if you are in pretty good health that things didn’t change much between sixty-five and eighty-five. That’s not true. It is very different, a big adjustment.

My ego and the image I had for myself—what it’s been for a long, long time—had to change. That’s hard to deal with. I really had no concept about how challenging that would be.

Men and women who had powerful careers usually feel loss when they step down. Moms and dads often undergo a difficult transition when their children grow up, launch out, and leave an empty nest behind. The life you’ve known for so long just isn’t the same anymore.

Even if your transition into retirement is ideal, you are likely to be surprised by unexpected, new realities. A close friend told me what happened when she and her husband began planning their retirement:

My husband was a lawyer who joked that after “the big case” came across his desk, he would retire to a warm climate, play unending golf, and dine out to his heart’s desire. We had friends who were buying second homes in a lazy Florida coastal town. We dreamed of doing the same and, one day, moving there full time to spend our old age.

Then it happened; a wrongful death suit for the son of a former client resulted in the largest settlement in the history of the county. With our part of the fees, we purchased a gorgeous home on the outskirts of that coastal town, close to his buddies for a guaranteed foursome whenever the course summoned his inner golf pro. This home had bedrooms for our daughters and their future spouses plus a loft where we dreamed of eventually welcoming grandchildren who we would lure to visit Grandpa and Grandma with our backyard pool and the Atlantic beach a block away.

That fall we began picking out furniture to ship to our new home. Shortly after Christmas we took off in a fully loaded Jeep, heading south to soak up the sun’s rays in anticipated coastal bliss. Those first January days were filled with decorating and settling into the house, golf dates every other day and dining out at the city’s many popular restaurants. Friends and family lined up to visit. This was the life we had dreamed of for years. Or was it? At the end of that first month, we were surprised how we felt. My husband said, “I can’t live the rest of my life in constant weekend mode.”

Without realizing it, many people expect to “live happily ever after” in retirement but haven’t thought much about how that will occur. The good news is it is possible to thrive throughout your later years. How? The purpose of this book is to help you identify the few critical factors that will matter most to your life, then offer practical tips on how to increase your happiness.
Three Seasons of Life

Life has three primary seasons, with each lasting twenty-five to thirty years.

Season one is childhood when you grow up, acquire most of your education, and eventually move out on your own to work, start a family, or both.

Next comes season two, adulthood. This covers your most productive years when you build up your net worth, make big purchases like a home and cars, and rear your family.

In due course, you come to another major juncture. Your house is bigger than you need. Your career is over. Your kids are off on their own. Now what? For that matter, what do you even call this next season? Third season? There isn’t a widely accepted term for this period. It is telling that we don’t have popular language to describe this significant period of life.

For a while retirement was the label for this third stage of life, but that word is no longer fashionable. Did you know that AARP dropped retired from its name? Older adults are sensitive about the words used to describe aging and retirement. In 2010, Elderhostel rebranded itself Road Scholar. Whether you call it retirement, third season, or something else, you can be sure that the life-altering experience is still around and stronger than ever.

The third season of life is new territory, in large measure because people didn’t use to live very long past retirement. It is different today. Your third season will likely last decades. What kind of life will you put together in your bonus years? Will your third season be the exhilarating capstone of your life or a dismally long, slow decline? This book will show you how to make your third season a time to thrive.

A friend from North Carolina disagrees with me about life having three major seasons. He argues there are four seasons of age:

1.  Childhood: when you believe in Santa Claus

2.  Older childhood: when you no longer believe in Santa Claus

3.  Adulthood: when you are Santa Claus, giving presents to your kids

4.  Later adulthood: when you look like Santa Claus
Decades to Go

When you turn sixty-five—perhaps you already have—and anticipate twenty to thirty years still ahead of you, what other period of life lasted this long? Two or three decades are about as long as you spent getting all your education. That block of time is similar to how long you took raising your children. It takes thirty years or fewer to slowly pay off an entire mortgage. Hardly anyone stays at the same job for twenty years anymore. Think hard about such an elongated span of time—twenty to thirty years. How will you spend yours? And where will you turn for ideas and advice about how to thrive during your extra years? There are plenty of ways to learn about parenting, marriage, a career, or financial planning, but where do you look for answers about a fulfilling life as an older adult?

This book will help you identify the few critical factors that matter most to your life and then give you practical tips on how to increase your happiness in each part of your life.
Retirement Will Shake Your World

My friend Bill is an energetic guy. He’s physically fit and cheerful. His job is athletic director at a large junior high school where he teaches PE classes and coaches multiple sports. During the summer months, he works in construction, which helps him keep in shape and adds funds to the family budget. He’s so talented with a hammer and saw that he used his building skills to assemble a stately Victorian home where he and his wife have raised their four children. While he had some help, my friend personally pounded in most of the nails.

But this past year has been a troubling one for Bill. He returned to school last fall—as he has for years—only this year will be his last as a teacher. The school district requires him to retire at age sixty, and he’s just crossed that line. He’s at the top of his game, but he’s being forced to stop. What comes next?

Bill is seldom fearful, but his approaching transition is uncomfortable and, in some ways, scary. The end of his long-tenure post is only part of the story. Until now, he and his wife, Karen, worked hard together to make a good life. They worked on their marriage. They worked at parenting. They built and meticulously maintained their large home. Is it time now to downsize? Their roles are changing too. Their grown son moved out to live on his own. One daughter has her own family with a husband and two children. Another daughter is graduating from college, and the youngest daughter is about to finish high school and leave for college.

Look at all Bill and Karen are facing! His career is ending. Their nest will soon be empty. And this is just the beginning of changes in their third season. Bill should have decades of good health and energy still ahead of him. How should he and Karen plan their next stage of life?

People encounter major life disruptions when there’s divorce, a family member becomes seriously ill, a job requires relocation, or there’s a financial crisis. Retirement is often just as disruptive. I urge you: don’t romanticize retirement, thinking it means you will live happily ever after. Give this season of life serious thought, and it will turn out well.
Caution: Retirement Can Kill You

A landmark study tracked all Shell Oil employees between 1973 and 2003. The study report concluded:

The wrenching effects of retirement often magnify if you take retirement early or leave your career for any reason at a relatively young age. Rigorous research of all the employees at Shell Oil across thirty years produced startling findings. People who retire at fifty-five die much sooner than their counterparts who retire at sixty-five: People who retire at 55 are 89% more likely to die in the 10 years after retirement than those who retire at 65.… “Mortality improved with increasing age at retirement for people from both high and low socioeconomic groups.”

Couple that with the fact that leaving work early risks early death: 61 percent of American retirees say they stopped working sooner than they’d planned. It shows how common it is for people to confront the critical question, What am I going to do with myself now? Having a job often stretches you and keeps you active.

Do you have a plan for a stimulating life once you stop working? What will you do with yourself? Earlier generations didn’t have an extended third season. You do.
It Happened to Me

I was in my mid sixties when I “crossed the line.” You know, that line where you suddenly realize you’ve entered a season of tremendous adjustment. The poet Emily Dickinson said this when she passed that threshold: “Old age comes on suddenly, and not gradually as is thought.”

Each of us crosses into the next season of life sooner or later. The change came early, possibly in your forties, if your children growing up and leaving home was an upsetting experience. Your empty nest disrupted the flow of life you’d had for years. You began wondering, What’s next for me?

For others, leaving a career of many years feels strange. Privately they think, Who am I now? There was a familiar rhythm of going to work and coming home, but now what? Try imagining how someone like the late Billy Graham felt at the close of his hugely influential career. He said, “Growing old has been the greatest surprise of my life.”

Have you arrived at that stage yet where you feel life has shifted and become decidedly different from your past? Looking back, I can see when my sudden surprise came. My awakening started with a peculiar birthday celebration on the day I turned sixty-five. I was traveling in India, where I’d been many times for work with international charities. I smugly thought I was exempt from worries about aging, because I was a senior executive with a large nonprofit organization and thought I’d remain that way for a long time. The organization I was leading had recently asked me for my ten-year plan. It seemed I could ignore retirement.

This was the only time I can recall when I was outside the United States on my birthday. Complicating matters was the fact that I was leading a group of donors on a tour. My travel companions wanted to see a high-impact program I was leading for kids in orphanages and others trapped in different types of terrible situations. We had developed a very successful program of training adult volunteers to become lay counselors.

I wanted to keep my birthday quiet so it wouldn’t call attention to my age. Someone found out though. There I was, with a band of American donors and several Indian staff, when someone brought out a cake and the group broke out in a loud chorus of “Happy Birthday.” They were cheerful, if a smidge off key. No one seemed to notice that I had crossed into the classic retirement age. I went to bed that night assuming that my life would stay pretty much as it was. In my mind I was still middle aged. Well, maybe late middle aged, but nowhere near old.

Little did I know how much my life would change in the next few months. A year later, my wife died. Within two years, I had left my job. I woke up one morning and wondered, What is my life now? Am I trapped or am I freer than ever before? I had such a jumble of mixed feelings. Life became different and unfamiliar. It finally dawned on me that I was in a whole new season of life. On one hand, I liked the release from relentless deadlines. Having lots of open time refreshed me. On the other hand, I missed the meaning that came from raising my family and directing important work in foreign countries.

There comes a point in retirement when you have fewer demands on you and you experience a gnawing doubt about whether there’s anything to anticipate in the future. I discovered that my usual habits and expectations about life no longer fit. I needed to do some serious thinking. What comes next? Can I be happy?

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "Thrive in Retirement"
by .
Copyright © 2019 Eric Thurman.
Excerpted by permission of The Crown Publishing Group.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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