About

ThrivingIntoRetirement.com is all about helping you design a future you will be excited about, then empowering you to take action to achieve it. This site serves as a helpful online resource for anyone thinking about or planning for retirement, whether starting early so you can jump on the "Financial Independence, Retire Early" (FIRE) bandwagon or already retired. My name is Dave, and I was born in the last year of the Baby Boom, 1964. I know, I know, "OK, boomer," but I promise I am striving to stay current and relevant and not to be a know-it-all (please leave a comment if you catch me stepping over that line!). I'm also trying really hard not to wear socks with sandals...

Being an engineer by training and with a background in data analytics, I have a tendency to research the heck out of anything I'm going to do or buy (yes, it drives my wife crazy!). I guess you could say that over the last several years, I have acquired a master's degree's worth of knowledge around planning and preparing for an awesome retirement.

Using the other side of my brain, I love to write and travel, and you'll rarely find me without a camera in my hand on my journeys. My wife and I have quite the bucket list full of other trips and adventures awaiting us! So even though I like my "day job", I am also excited about leaving it behind in the next 5-10 years so we can hike off into the sunset and enjoy our best days ever! And so I can spend more time helping you and others thrive into retirement.

I'm glad you asked! As I hope you can tell, I really enjoy helping people, so I want to encourage you to do the right things to set yourself up for an awesome retirement. And in this age of information overload, I want to make that as easy and simple for you as possible. There are articles and reviews of products and services that boil down the hundreds of hours I've spent researching into brief and (hopefully) entertaining blog posts, which I hope you'll find so useful and funny and informative that you'll tell everyone you know, and even someone you don't.

There's something else I want to achieve with you: Awareness. It's alarming to me how many people I encounter who believe the only thing you have to do to be ready for retirement is save enough money. That's important, of course. But just like your life up until this point, there are so many other factors that will influence the quality of your retirement. For example, if you don't take care of your health, it may not matter how much money you've accumulated if you aren't mobile enough--or even alive--to enjoy it. There are several additional essential elements required for a thriving retirement, which I've detailed in what I call the Aging Manifesto. You can view it on this site, and I'm happy to offer it as a free download for you as well since it can serve as a north star to guide your decision making as move closer to retirement and your best days ever.

One more thing: I don't want to simply regurgitate a bunch of factoids and websites I've encountered through all my research. That wouldn't be much help. Instead, I want to share my experiences around these things in hopes that you can take that and picture whether you might have a similar experience. When I write reviews of products and services, it will be based on my experience with them. If I am investigating something (i.e., research the heck out of it!) and ultimately decided not to pursue it, that feedback will obviously not be based on experience, but it may still help you to understand why another "regular person" decided not to do it or buy it. To that end, I will gladly accept requests for information, so if there's something in particular you'd like to get my take on, please leave a comment and I'll gladly provide that in a future article or review.

I'm glad you asked! As I hope you can tell, I really enjoy helping people, so I want to encourage you to do the right things to set yourself up for an awesome retirement. And in this age of information overload, I want to make that as easy and simple for you as possible. There are articles and reviews of products and services that boil down the hundreds of hours I've spent researching into brief and (hopefully) entertaining blog posts, which I hope you'll find so useful and funny and informative that you'll tell everyone you know, and even someone you don't.

You may ask why I've included this picture of myself in the uniform of my "day job" , and that would be a good question. As you may know, in the business world it's common to have a mission and a vision for your organization to help people understand what you're about and to align them with a unifying purpose. I thought it would be helpful to do the same thing for Thriving Into Retirement and this website.

My mission is to help others thrive into retirement. This journey begins with a simple question:  How will you know when you are ready?

My vision for this business is:

I'm really glad you stopped by. In this age of ever-accelerating change, it has become increasingly difficult to keep up. It seems like nearly everything is so different now than it was even just 10 years ago--from the way we work to the way we relate to one another; from the way we find and consume information to the way entertainment makes its way into our homes. It's natural for people in their 40s and beyond to feel outdated or even marginalized.

But we still have a lot to offer, and a lot of life left in us. We can and should continue to make a difference in the world, maybe now more so than ever.

I'm a big hockey fan. In this game, the third and final period is often the most action-packed and exciting. Looking at life as though it were a hockey game, the first period could be viewed as the part of your life where you are learning and growing and figuring out who you are and want to be. 

The second period is that time of your life when you transition into your career and perhaps focus on creating a family of your own. Great times woven throughout, but we're so focused on "doing life" that we often forget to live it.

Now we are in the third period--the most exciting time! We become wise enough to realize our lives are ours to live. Fulfillment is at our fingertips. We revel in our new-found freedom. As the stress of raising kids and building a career starts to taper off (or at least there's a light at the end of the tunnel), we live more in the moment. Gratitude floods into our hearts as we begin to recognize and appreciate our blessings great and small.

And maybe for the first time in our lives, we have both time and money to do the things we've always wanted to do, go to the places we've always wanted to go. To live into our purpose. What could be better and more exciting than that?!

It's my earnest hope that all of us already in or moving into the third period of our lives will own our age, embrace it, and do everything in our power to make these our best days ever. There's no reason why we should go quietly into that great good night!

Anyway, I've talked enough. It's time for me to hear from you! I hope you will join this amazing community! I'd love to hear from you in the comments section. Let me know if there are things you find particularly helpful or if there are topics you'd like me to cover. And I always welcome questions. I'm here to help!

Warm regards,

Dave