Having enough money doesn’t mean you need to retire–look at Warren Buffet…

Check out Mary Lloyd’s May 27 guest post on Karma Kitaj’s blog Retirement as You Want It/.

Some resume advice given to those of us over 50 is misguided-and wrong.

At an AARP job fair I volunteered at yesterday, several job seekers told me stories of situations where they had ideal qualifications for work they were applying for, but they didn’t include it, because it was more than ten years ago.    They were under the impression that hiring supervisors were death on seeing anything but their most recent experience. 

This is ridiculous.  The strongest thing someone over 50 has to offer an employer is the breadth and depth of their experience.  It means they know how to show up for work on time, solve a problem without creating a new one, soothe an irate customer, and so on.  Negating that by limiting what you can talk about to the last ten years is lunacy.

This suggested strategy is probably stemming from a misunderstanding of advice that you include only the last ten years of experience on your resume to reduce the chances of ageism.    There is some legitimacy to that.  But it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t mention relevant experience  at all.  It just means you don’t need to list every job you ever had.  (Remember when we didn’t have experience and we were desperate to list anything that looked like a job?)

If you are looking for work and have been in the workforce for a while, you need to be both creative and attentive in what you tell a prospective employer about what you can do.  A key piece of a good resume writing strategy is to separate your achievements and strengths from the chronology of your work experience in how your format your information.  That way, you can mention that you successfully owned and operated a car repair shop, even if it was twenty years ago, for example.

The most important thing to do with your resume is to give the person to whom you are sending it a clear idea of your experience at solving the problems they are trying to address.  When you learned that skill isn’t anywhere near as important as that you have it.

Experience is GOOD.  But knowing what part of the vast amount you have applies to the job you’re seeking is critical.  Telling everybody everything won’t work.  But neither does not telling the person who needs to know, simply because you did it more than ten years ago.  Use your head on this and stop  following arbitrary rules that well-meaning but misguided unemployment counselors offer.

**** Mary Lloyd is CEO of Mining Silver and author of Supercharged Retirement:  Ditch the Rocking Chair, Trash the Remote, and Do What You Love.  For more, visit her website at http://www.mining-silver.com

There are really good life coaches out there who GET IT about the importance of customizing your retirement years.

Karma Kitaj is one of them. She seems like my emotional twin in the attitude with which she reviews my book Supercharged Retirement. Check out her blog for what has to say about the book and the possibilities for “after we give up work.”

If you want to be miserable in retirement, assume your primary relationship will take care of itself.

Check out Mary Lloyd’s guest post on financial planner Steve Juetten’s Seattle Examiner blog.  How to Mesh Retirement with Your Relationship.

Knowing when to give up on a project or plan requires both wisdom and courage. How do you decide?

Health care reform legislation is still being debated and the outcome of the eventual vote is getting “iffier’ by the minute. In my home state of Washington, they’re in special session of the legislature because they’d been unable to get agree upon a budget during the regular session. These are two political examples of something we all grapple with personnally:  How do you decide when it’s time to throw in the towel?

My dad seemed better at this than I am.  Raised during the depression, with the family in dire straights after the death of his father, he was still capable of deciding when something simply wasn’t worth working on any more.  He was good with his hands and had a wonderful, practical mind, so it didn’t happen very often.   But when it was time, he was wise about pulling the plug.  Sometimes it was to just throw the thing out and buy a new one.  Sometimes it was to start over with better materials.  Sometimes it was to take a different approach to solving the problem that precipitated the effort in the first place.

I need that wisdom.  Way too often, I end up piling one bad solution on top of another and making a monstrously ineffective mess of the whole thing.  My kitchen is a good example.  It needs to be remodeled.  The appliances are starting to die.  The  countertops were chipped and cut up when I moved in six years ago.  The flooring was probably worn out long before that, but it’s still there.

This is my year to redo the kitchen.  All I really need to do is those three things.  Instead, I’ve turned it into a project that makes a lunar launch look simple.  I need to quit and go back to basics.   I am wasting time now and money eventually if I don’t.

It would be nice if we could get it right and perfect the first time we did anything.   But that’s not reality.  It takes courage to look at a lot of hard work and decide you have to give up on it.   But building onto old bad solutions only worsens the problem.  This is true for my life.  This is true for my state.  This is true for my country.  Two wrongs don’t always make a right.  Sometimes they just make a bigger mess.

By Mary Lloyd, CEO, Mining Silver and author of Supercharged Retirement:  Ditch the Rocking Chair, Trash the Remote, and Do What You Love.

Read Mary Lloyd’s guest post on the Seattle Examiner site.

Steve Juetten graciously invited me to write a piece for his blog for the Seattle Examiner.  He posted it this morning.   He’s a financial planner who”gets it” about the need to mesh financial planning with non-fiancial planning to have “retirement” be satisfying.   I’m hoping Steve will do a guest piece here, but in the meantime, check out my guest post as well as the rest of his blog.

By Mary Lloyd, CEO, Mining Silver

Clips from a business speech:  (about 13 minutes, but it covers a lot of ground)

Mary Lloyd author of Super-Charged Retirement on Vimeo.

By Mary Lloyd, CEO, Mining Silver

When I started this blog over a year ago, I did so with quite a bit of reluctance.  I am to that point in life where flexibility is paramount and I didn’t want to be bound be the “musts” of blogging.  Thou shalt blog at least once a day.  Thou shalt blog no more than 400 words at a time.  Thou shalt be prepared to blog while on vacation and otherwise away from the space where you are prepared and outfitted to blog…in any corner of the world at any time of the day.

Obviously, I have not played by those rules and the most glaring example has been the last three weeks.  You haven’t heard a peep from me.  I’m really sorry about that.  But I can explain.

It’s not anything awful.  It’s just…well…I’ve been living my life.  And that involved a bike trip followed by two weeks on the road in Colorado doing book tour stuff and having some fun.  I’m not a fan of the “I’m making myself dinner” style of blogging, so you didn’t hear about all that.

I finally realized as I was slithering out from under the resulting pile of guilt this afternoon that those who read this are most likely just as happy with that  as I am.  When I write here, I hope it’s to offer something useful.   If I write too often, I may actually be offering you less.  Case in point:  I am subscribed to several online newsletters and the ones that come even once a week are starting to wear me out.  TOO MUCH INFORMATION!

So this post is just to set the record straight.  I will write when I can and you will read when you want.  Hopefully, we can enjoy each other best that way.  If you need more, please feel free to complain by sending me a note.  Or commenting on this post.  Thanks.

Life is sweetest when rules are kept to a minimum.  Down with blogging tyranny!

If Not Retirement, WHAT?

The downturn has a silver lining if you use it to customize your plans for “retirement.”  Mary Lloyd will discuss how to do that and sign her book, Supercharged Retirement:  Ditch the Rocking Chair, Trash the Remote, and Do What You Love.

Thursday, Sept. 10 at 7:00 PM
 Barnes & Noble Booksellers
 Vancouver Plaza
 7700 NE Fourth Plain Blvd,
 Vancouver, WA 98662
 (360) 253-9007

Join us if you can!

JOIN US IF YOU CAN!

Sunday, August 23, 3:30 PM

Barnes & Noble Booksellers at The Citadel, Colorado Springs

795 Citadel Drive, Colorado Springs, CO 80909

719-637-8282

AUTHOR DISCUSSION AND SIGNING – If Not Retirement, WHAT?

Tuesday, August 25, 9:10 AM

Radio Interview with Rick Crandall, KEZW-AM 1430 

(streams online at www.kezw.com)

Tuesday, August 25, 7:30 PM

Tattered Cover Book Store, Colfax Avenue
2526 East Colfax Avenue, Denver, Colorado 80206

303-322-7727

AUTHOR DISCUSSION AND BOOK SIGNING –If Not Retirement, WHAT?