A new blog post, and I’m going to feature the “Don’s personal touch” series
I apologize for mentioning our podcasts as add-ons to my blog posts. Creating them was an intense process. It’s only now, with a bit more time to listen at ease, that the depth of the discussions comes home to me. In fact, the more I listen to them, the more impressed I am by the quality of the experts we interviewed (every one a global leader in their field) and the quality of their contributions. Alex Mazer and I feel very fortunate that such outstanding people gave us their take on retirement issues.
This podcast (#8 in the series, with its theme reflected in the title of this blog post http://donezra.com/podcasts/) features two guests. Ida Rademacher is Vice President of the Aspen Institute and Executive Director of the Aspen Financial Security Program. Will Sandbrook is Executive Director of NEST Insight (NEST being the UK’s National Employment Savings Trust). Together, they head the Aspen-NEST Insight Transatlantic Collaboration, a partnership dedicated to helping to solve the next generation of retirement challenges.
This interview was recorded in the summer of 2019, but as its focus is the future – indeed, the long-term future – the discussion hasn’t lost any of its relevance.
Let me also pay tribute to the wizardry of Janette Luu, Marketing + Communications Director at Common Wealth. There are enormous technical issues involved in recording three streams of input from three different countries, and making sure that they blend well, and we’d be lost without Janette.
I hope you enjoy this podcast, and that you’ve enjoyed its predecessors in the series. And there are two more to come – bonuses for you to relish.
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One final aspect. I’m conscious of the fact that you’re interested in retirement from a personal point of view. The individual is the ultimate beneficiary, the end-user, of all the institutional efforts in the retirement system. Not all of those efforts are visible to the end-user. That’s why, to conclude each episode, I’ve added a piece called “Don’s personal touch,” in which my goal is to show you how the expertise applies to you as a retiree or prospective retiree, and what action steps they prompt.
If you’re anything like me (and my family would say it’s good if you’re not!), I’m the old-fashioned type and like to see things in front of me, not just hear them. So I’ll make those “personal touch” pieces available in written form. I’m sure it’ll be easy for me to transcribe them and create a few additional blog posts out of them. Quite possibly you’re much more advanced and take things in verbally – in which case of course you’ll skip those blog posts.
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I have written about retirement planning before and some of that material also relates to topics or issues that are being discussed here. Where relevant I draw on material from three sources: The Retirement Plan Solution (co-authored with Bob Collie and Matt Smith, published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2009), my foreword to Someday Rich (by Timothy Noonan and Matt Smith, also published by Wiley, 2012), and my occasional column The Art of Investment in the FT Money supplement of The Financial Times, published in the UK. I am grateful to the other authors and to The Financial Times for permission to use the material here.