freedom time happiness book cover

Freedom, Time, Happiness

A Companion Guide to Life Two

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What Is Life After Full-Time Work?

It’s often called “retirement,” but that label itself deserves to be retired. It’s so negative!

  • It’s far from the end of life. It’s the start of a new life. I call it Life Two. Everything else is a prologue to Life Two. It’s our time of freedom, our time of enjoyment, our time of greatest happiness.
  • Most people’s instinctive reaction to thinking about it is something like: “It’s so complicated! Too many choices. I’ve no idea what to do about it. I wouldn’t even know where to start.” I’m going to give you a framework in which to make your own decisions, a context that will put things in perspective and give you a feeling of control.

To change these misconceptions, I’m writing a book called Freedom, Time, Happiness: how to get to and enjoy what used to be called retirement.

I’m living Life Two myself. It’s not just personal experience in the book, but also lots of research that I have gathered together and divided into small pieces. I’ve drawn several lessons from that wisdom, each on one small aspect of life after full-time work, so that you can focus on one issue at a time and not be overwhelmed.

Actually I’ve divided the writing into two books. Life Two (with the same subtitle) is designed as 24 walks through this territory, with me as your tour guide. Think of it as familiar territory but different from the land in which we spend our working lives, Life One. Each walk in Life Two has an exercise at the end, to apply the learning to your own life, because that way the learning will stick and by the end you will have developed your own plan to thrive. Those 24 walks are the essential steps.

But there’s so much more! And so I’ve developed Freedom, Time, Happiness (or FTH, for short) as a companion book, to complement Life Two. And while Life Two has a modest price attached, FTH is free, and available on this website. I think of Life Two as the Walking Tour, and FTH as the Hop-On-Hop-Off (or Hoho) Bus Tour.

My lessons are about four aspects of Life Two:

  • Happiness and psychology (because that’s the goal and how to get there);
  • Investment (because that’s what powers our vehicle);
  • Longevity (because we should have an idea of how long that life will be);
  • Finance (putting it all together).

There’s more, but you can check FTH for the details. And the calculator is free on the website too, as it has been since I introduced it.

Sections

Where The Route Takes Us

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Prologue: A Few Thoughts Before We Start

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Route 1: Exploring Happiness And The Psychology Of Life Two

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Route 2: Investment

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Route 3: Exploring Longevity

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Route 4: Exploring Retirement Finance

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The Trail For Enthusiasts

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The Destinations

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References

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I have written about retirement planning before and some of that material also relates to topics or issues that are discussed in FTH. 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. That material, and all of the material and information here, is provided for educational purposes only. For advice about your own circumstances, please consult with your financial professionals.