Let's Retire Retirement (Literally)

This book undid some deep programming I didn’t know I had.

Today is launch day for a book I’m proud to have co-written: Let’s Retire Retirement. If you’ve ever felt behind, exhausted, or unsure about what “retirement” even means anymore, this book might just change the way you think about your future.

Would you consider ordering a copy or sharing it with someone who needs it?

Order and get bonus goodies here.

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If you're an entrepreneur, creative professional, caregiver, or anyone whose career doesn't fit the traditional 9-to-5 mold, you've probably stared at retirement calculators with a sinking feeling. The numbers don't add up. The timeline doesn't work. The whole system seems designed for someone else's life.

Today is launch day for a book I'm proud to have co-written: Let's Retire Retirement. This is for everyone who's realized that the retirement dream we’ve been sold isn't realistic, attainable, or even desirable for most of us today.

The System Wasn't Built for Us

You have to walk into the vocation of a writer with your eyes wide open. No illusions, no glamorous filters. For all the romanticism around books and publishing, this is not a path to wealth, not for most of us. It's a path to meaning, to self-development, to fulfillment. It might be a path to financial wellbeing if you're lucky, talented, tenacious, and get just the right breaks. But if we're being honest, the statistics about writers and money are sobering at best, bleak at worst. Most professional writers I know, who tend to be brilliant and creative, live with some degree of precarity.

Traditional retirement? That's… cute.

Most of us realize, at some point, that we'll be working and writing well into our later years. Not because we wouldn't like more space and security, but because the model doesn't map easily onto a creative life.

But it's not just writers. The central premise of Let's Retire Retirement is simple, and subversive: traditional retirement isn't realistic for the vast majority of us.

And more importantly, it isn't even what most of us actually want.

We don't want to stop working. We want to stop grinding.

We don't want to disappear from the world. We want to reorient our time around what (and who) matters most.

We don't want to delay joy. We want to be fully alive now and later.

The Cost of Waiting

This understanding was first slow to come, and then gave me a fair amount of angst for a long time. The angst increased when I had my daughter, who is now 8 years old. I spent the first few years of her life trying to grow my business, worked long hours, ground it out week after week. By the end of every day, I was so wiped out that I had very little energy left for her… and I hated that.

After some serious soul searching, I decided I'd rather be a present mother for her and take less clients, make less money, and perhaps not save nearly as much (or at all) for a time so that I could be with her while she was still young and interested in hanging out with her mom.

I made that decision and felt good about what it meant for my relationship with her. But I never felt good about what it meant financially. Retirement loomed on the horizon like some impossible goal that might never be reached.

One of my favorite chapters in the book is called The ROI of Right Now. In it, Derek talks about how we're conditioned to think about opportunity cost in terms of money, as in, what you might lose in the market by spending instead of investing. But he flips that around and asks: what's the opportunity cost of not spending time with your kids? Of not going on the trip? Of waiting to be available in retirement until everyone else has moved on?

That chapter helped me to confront a painful truth: no amount of money saved will be worth the time you can't buy back. Although I was already living out that truth, I hadn’t made peace with what it meant. That chapter helped me see how I was already on the right track, making choices that were best for my family and for me.

A Different Framework for Financial Security

When I first started working with Derek Coburn on Let's Retire Retirement, I thought I was helping him write a book about money: retirement, finances, long-term planning, etc. We started this book seven years ago, and after we wrote the rough draft, we set it aside for some time.

In that gap, Derek and I both lived a lot of life: the pandemic came and went, we both lost our fathers, we both experienced a transition in our respective businesses that changed the way we looked at our work.

When Derek reached out to begin the process again, it was with renewed clarity about what he wanted to say: Underneath the stories, advice, and data about retirement is the truth that life is fleeting. Instead of yearning for some golden age after traditional retirement, we have to build a fulfilling life now, one we don't want to retire from.

That's not to say money doesn't matter. It does. Planning and saving are important. The book doesn't argue against financial responsibility… it's actually filled with practical, actionable advice. As someone who has cycled through many financial advisors, I found myself wondering why I’d never heard any of this before.

Turns out, most financial advisors aren’t equipped to advise people who have a non-traditional career and work life.

Let’s Retire Retirement is structured in three clear parts: first, it dismantles the outdated assumptions we’ve inherited about retirement: where the idea of retirement came from, why it no longer serves us, and who it was actually built for. From there, it moves into real-life stories and examples that show how people are designing lives they don’t want to retire from. Finally, it offers a flexible framework for rethinking your own relationship to work, time, and money, regardless of where you are in your career or how much you’ve saved.

This isn’t a book about budgeting hacks or cutting lattes. It’s about rethinking the entire premise of retirement, as well as the math that drives it. One of the most powerful (and freeing) ideas in the book is that if you simply extend your time horizon—like planning to work until 75 instead of 65—you can reduce your required monthly savings by up to 96% (depending on your goals and your timeline), dramatically decreasing financial pressure now while still securing your future.

Derek also offers counterintuitive but practical advice around tax planning, like how choosing which retirement accounts to draw from (and in what order) can make a significant difference in your long-term outcomes. The book gives you real strategies to build a better, more flexible life, starting right where you are.

Going Beyond the Fear

There's a particular kind of fear that comes with realizing, deep in your gut, I will not be rescued by retirement. Looking at the spreadsheets and seeing how far you are from "the number" can feel like being dropped into deep water with no land in sight. That panic is real.

But you can also use that as the moment that something shifts. The ultimate goal isn't to escape work. The goal is to shape it into something that sustains you for a lifetime, not just financially, but spiritually, emotionally, relationally.

When you stop trying to win a game that isn't built for you, you can finally ask better questions: What kind of life can I build on my terms? How can I build a life that’s so good, I won’t want to retire from it?

If you've ever felt behind, exhausted, or unsure about what "retirement" even means anymore, this book might just change the way you think about your future. There is no such thing as the perfect plan, but the book will help you start asking better questions about what financial security and a meaningful life actually look like when the old rules no longer apply.

Would you consider ordering a copy or sharing it with someone who needs it? Order and get bonus goodies here.