h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

i sold s book idea last month ..... not for millions or anything .... but for a few quid ...."how to quit the day job" comes out in ireland in january courtesy of blackhall press .... i got it on the back of a column i've been writing on retirement & pensions .... and now i have to write the firstr draft in 9 weeks ...... well i had a lot more than that, but i got side tracked and now time is running away with me! but how hard can it be?

Anyway, in May the column goes like this.....

“You’re doing what?”
He repeats the sentence calmly, ignoring the lap of coffee around his feet and the shards of what used to be his favourite coffee mug now scattered in a three foot radius around his kitchen floor.
He’s a phlegmatic man my Dad. He always was.
“We’re driving from Little Rock to the Grand Canyon, attending a five day geological lecture series and then driving back again. In a 1983 Toyota”
I mentally run through the full gamut of adult responses-stroke-flabbergasted comments that I might make; systematically filing them into panic alert grades green, amber, red as I go, and finally settle on one of the more innocuous options.
“But you were a surgeon. You know nothing about geology”
There’s a pause. Not a long pause, I’ll grant you, but there is a pause.
“And you’re eighty two years old. And he’s eighty eight. And the trip is fifteen hundred miles each way. And the car! The car is nearly as old as you are”
Sometimes I find it difficult not to slip in to hyperbole when I’m making an otherwise logical point.
My Dad smiles benignly. He’s known me for awhile.
“Well, I’m hardly going to go on holiday with you. And Bill is so insistent that I spend some time with him.”
Ten minutes and a fresh pot of coffee later I’m beginning to calm down. After all the thought of two men and a Toyota with a combined age of almost two hundred making a three thousand mile car journey across central America isn’t really that alarming. Not when you switch to decaf. And anyway, isn’t he proving a point I keep trying to make to my clients. The one about retirement being a time of opportunity and big horizons. The one about having the freedom to do all the things they’ve previously stored up lovingly in their dreams and aspirations, longing for the moment when their hopes might come alive. The one about how a retirement fund of four hundred thousand Euro just isn’t going to cut the mustard.
That one is the one that gets me on my soapbox.
Later on when we’re huddling round the Aga munching on toasted scones I ask him how much income he thinks a person needs to live on when they reach eighty two years old. He tells me about his friends the retired dentist and his wife, both approaching their mid nineties and still playing table tennis every Wednesday morning. He talks about his retired architect pal, eighty nine next birthday, who has decided to convert his house into apartments so that his grandchildren can have their own place when they come to stay - and is supervising the work himself. Answering my question not with a sterile number estimate but with humorous stories of real life octogenarian flamboyance he paints a rosy picture of how life can be for those who are financially independent and successfully ageing.
Back at home that night I log onto Wikipedia to learn about successful ageing, also known as ‘optimal ageing’ and am stuck by how much of what defines this desireable objective is dependent on an individual’s capacity to fund what is described as an active engagement with life.
I send my Dad an email.
“You’re hitting these eighties well” I say.
He graciously replies that listening to my advice on pension planning played a crucial part in his decision to make the maximum possible pension contributions for the last ten years of his working life. He tells me that he now has ample funds to continue his active engagement with life. In fact, as well as his octogenarian Toyota ride across the USA he intends to sail single handed round Ireland later in the year. I ask him if he’s also screen testing for the James Bond role and resolve to increase my AVC contribution even higher.