What is an encore entrepreneur and how would growing a business impact your retirement plans?
Let’s chat about the 5 biggest myths regarding retirement and what it means to be an encore entrepreneur living and working during life 2.0.
No matter what you’ve done in life, if you’ve taken the time to truly understand what you do, you become an encore entrepreneur by simply talking about what you know. Because you know a bunch. Do something for as long as you have and you’ll know enough about it to be able to counsel someone else in that same area.
A quote from Toby during our livestream
Shelley’s husband, Kevin, officially retired this week, and he’s pretty happy about it.
If you go online and check out Five Myths of Retirement, most of the things you find are about investing and saving for your retirement years.
We think there is more to it than that.
One myth is that retirement is your financial status. When we are filling out forms: name, email, are you married, single, or divorced? Keep going down the form to: are you working or are you a student? Are you working part time? Are you a stay-at-home parent or are you retired?
Retirement is a financial status in this case, but I feel that retirement is a stage of life, a state of mind, and a time to feel renewed freedom.
Much like when you were a child, and you had your parents taking care of your needs, you have most of your needs met and you can make choices.
You can feel free because you have fewer responsibilities. It’s time to live off of your retirement savings and social security and enjoy life without obligations.
Toby Younis: I remember being in my work period, which coincided with my family-building period, and making decisions and choices.
The difference between then and now was my decisions and choices were not only affecting me, but they were also affecting the people around me.
Now I can make decisions and choices on my own. I don’t have to check with anybody.
Retirement is a stage of life. You get opportunities. You’re going to have decisions and choices, and you’re going to have more freedom as a retiree to deal with those decisions and choices.
Myth number two for us is that you rely upon Social Security and Medicare and you have a fixed income that will not change unless there’s a cost-of-living increase to social security.
You have influence over your finances.
You can decide to downsize. For instance, my husband and I live in a five-bedroom home, but our kids have moved out. Our house is on a big piece of property, about ⅓ of an acre.
We are ready to downsize to a smaller home. Our house will sell for more than what we will pay for our next home.
With the money that is left over, we can invest or add to our retirement accounts.
Many people downsize and sell off property and collectibles when they reach retirement age.
You can reduce your hours down to part-time with your current employer and continue working.
You can get a part-time job or work as a consultant, or you can start your own entrepreneurial business.
These methods can provide an income to supplement your savings and social security.
Toby Younis: I started my retirement planning at a very early age. Thanks to some good advice from people in the military. If there is anything that you can do to improve your retirement, it is investing in your retirement at a very young age when you’re still working.
Shelley’s husband, Kevin, began by working with the financial manager that his father had used. They had a good plan right from the beginning, and that is making it easier for them to transition. They’re in a position where they’re not having to rely specifically on Social Security.
My only caution with Social Security is that eventually there’s going to be an administration in office that is going to privatize Social Security and Medicare. Instead of getting Medicare, you’re going to get healthcare at a reduced cost from one of the healthcare insurance providers.
The same with Social Security. Instead of being taken out of your paycheck and being held by the government, the Social Security Trust fund will go to a financial management company of your choice.
That will be enough to provide you with a very basic standard of living.
In addition to that, you can work part time.
There are people in our age group working as greeters when you walk into Walmart. I realized their social security wasn’t enough, so they must work.
There’s a life stage in which you learn stuff and it doesn’t make any difference whether you’re a mechanic, an electrician, a high-tech analyst, or a salesperson. You have a lot of knowledge that has value.
We just had a conversation with Jen, Shelley’s partner in the Women Conquer Business show. I came into the room and Shelley mentioned how much I enjoy selling and how good I was at it. Jen is struggling with it, and I could tell her, here’s how I worked, here’s what made me successful.
It’s not a class in selling, but there are some fundamental principles that I acquired over 40 years of running my business and having to sell every day.
If we examine our work life, we know more about that job than anybody else does.
Your experience is an investment that you’ve earned and gives you the right to advise, counsel, and consult.
Become an encore entrepreneur by simply talking about what you know, because you know a bunch. You can’t do something for as long as you have and not know enough about it to counsel someone else in that same area.
Shelley Carney: There is some possibility of decline, but people place a lot of emphasis on simple things like “I forgot that word, so I must be getting dementia.”
You have a lot of knowledge that you’ve accumulated over 50, 60, or 70 years, and now the filing system is getting a little slow because there’s so much information in those files.
As an example, my mom had a stroke. Now when she talks to me on the phone, she gets frustrated because she can’t think of a word and she blames it on the stroke.
But everybody does that.
Don’t worry about it. Just keep doing your best and stay active.
We can choose to have a purpose in our lives and follow that purpose.
We can do things that make us feel needed, whether that’s babysitting the grandkids, volunteering, or helping a neighbor.
Whatever makes you feel needed is important to have in your life to help you stay active.
To stay aware of what’s going on in life, get out of the house and meet with people. Enjoy being in new situations. Look for the positive.
A growth mindset will make it more likely that you keep learning and staying active.
Toby Younis: We once assumed that retirement was A, the collection of your gold watch, and B, you went home and occasionally played shuffleboard or bridge with your friends.
There was no purpose to retirement.
What you do with retirement is a choice.
You can choose to do nothing saying to yourself, I’ve already put in my time. I spent 40 years raising my family and 40 years working.
I just want to kick back.
You find out really quickly that whole kicking back thing isn’t all it’s stacked up to be.
I’ve discovered that getting up every morning with a purpose, and having something to do, is important to me.
If I didn’t get another subscriber on my YouTube channel, I would still do it because it gives me a reason to get up, continue learning, continue exploring, continue to ask questions, and find out answers.
Decide what you want to do with your time. There are lots of opportunities.
There’s another myth that we have so much time and we have nothing to do and we get bored easily.
There are so many things to do!
Sometimes we have a wealth of choices, and we get analysis paralysis.
There are too many choices.
Don’t get paralyzed by too many choices.
In the last couple of years, they encouraged us to stay home and stay away from large groups of people to stay healthy.
We got used to staying home, and it became our comfort zone.
Getting out of our comfort zone takes effort.
You get an invitation from somebody: Come over to my house, we’re going to get together to enjoy the fire pit and have some wine.
You think it sounds fun, but I would have to get dressed and I don’t like the way my clothes fit.
Excuses make it into a whole thing.
But if we rely too much on staying in the house, watching television, and not going anywhere, we put on weight; we don’t keep in touch with our friends, and they drift off and stop inviting us to get together.
Toby Younis: That’s the beginning of isolation.
If you want to do something that gets you pumped up about the rest of your life, join the senior center. Every community has them. They provide many services and a better quality of life.
It’s another way to engage.
We like to take day trips around New Mexico.
For New Mexico Day Trips this last week, we had a tight schedule because of things that were happening in both of our lives, but we needed to record content for our show.
That means we have to go someplace, so I started making plans.
To get the content we wanted, we had to do something really hard for me: get up at six o’clock in the morning!
Shelley Carney: We had to do something that was really hard for me: getting all my Monday and Tuesday tasks done on Sunday!
Toby Younis: But once we were there in the cold wind on top of a small mountain, in the middle of southeastern New Mexico, and then we got back in the truck, I realized that was a lot of fun.
I got the benefit of coming home that evening and taking all the collected content and looking at it to sort it into the right file folders so that we can build videos.
That brings it all rushing back.
Here we are on top of this mountain, wind blowing, and I get this beautiful image of Shelley pointing out one petroglyph that I missed. I get to watch that all over again, and it brings back the feeling.
I realized she’s committed to this!
She was looking for these numbers where all the various petroglyphs were, and I felt validated.
She’s not just hanging out and complaining about how cold it is.
She’s wrapped up in her big jacket and headscarf and she’s bringing teamwork to our project.
Whatever trials I imagined about getting up that early in the morning, not getting enough sleep or enough to eat, all went away at that moment.
This was all worth it.
All you have to do is make a choice about what you’re going to do with your life.
Retirement shouldn’t be less interesting, or less dynamic, than your life when you weren’t retired.
I have six children and they all went to college. I was talking with my second child, my daughter Sean, who’s very artistic, talented, and smart. She had just gotten her acceptance to the University of Virginia.
We had a graduation party for her. Everything had wound down. It was about 11 o’clock at night. She and I were sitting on the couch mindlessly watching TV, and we started talking about her future.
She was talking about her high school experience. She said I feel like they were the best years of my life.
I said, if your high school was the best years of your life, what do you have to look forward to?
The best years of your life are ahead of you.
That’s just as true for leaving high school and going to college as it is for ending your work life and beginning your retirement life.
Here’s our last myth for today. All retirees are lonely.
Loneliness is a choice.
It’s a lifestyle.
To combat loneliness, choose a purpose that leads to meeting people.
You can choose to volunteer or belong to a club or a senior center.
Being friendly helps us to connect.
Shelley Carney: Toby has no problem walking up to people and asking them questions.
When you do that, most of the time you find people are happy to answer your questions. They’ve just been waiting for somebody to ask them.
So be friendly and ask questions.
Activities and events at senior centers, like Toby talked about, can help dispel loneliness. It will give you a social group you can hang out with.
You don’t have to limit yourself to people in your own age group.
I’m 15 years younger than Toby and we’re best friends. There’s no reason you can’t be best friends with somebody who’s in another generation.
You can even be like a grandpa or a grandma to somebody who isn’t actually your grandchild.
If you have a relationship with a neighbor who has a child, maybe they come home from school and their parents aren’t home from work yet. You can be a person who they can come to if they need something and their parents aren’t home yet.
There are many ways to be a part of other people’s lives in person and online.
There are many online groups, meetups, and memberships.
Toby Younis: There are people with interests that are common to yours. Go to meetup.com and start searching there because you can search by interest and locale.
There is no excuse for being lonely unless you choose to be lonely.
I tend to be extroverted, and I spend most of my life making connections because that was necessary for my business.
If you’re not an extrovert, don’t worry about it. There are places you can meet online where you don’t have to be any less of an introvert than you are now.
Shelley Carney: I recommend if you’re an introvert, you make one fantastic friend who is an extrovert because then it’s very complementary.
Then whenever you go somewhere, the extrovert doesn’t have a problem asking for things and the introvert can provide insight. We fill in each other’s blanks.
That would be my top recommendation to those who want to get out and meet more people but are having a hard time with it.
Make one fantastic friend who complements your style.
Like me and Toby.
An encore entrepreneur is somebody in the second half of life who wants to run a business.
You can categorize yourself as a business owner and that feels great. There is a lot of pride in being a business owner.
It gives you control over your finances because you can work really hard at something and bring in money. Or you can take a break for a month or two.
You’re more motivated to learn and grow if you have a business.
For instance, if small business owners are putting ads on YouTube and you need to learn how to do that to help your business grow, it pushes you to learn those things.
Having a purpose and passion drives action.
Instead of sitting passively at home, you are reaching out to people, making videos, and doing a podcast. Your purpose and your passion keep driving you to do those things.
You continue to meet and work with others when you have your own business.
You need to meet people for referrals and for clients and to keep your business going.
Toby Younis: If you’ve never had your own business before, there are resources out there to help you get started.
Contact the Small Business Administration office in your city and ask them what courses they offer.
Associated with the Small Business Administration is SCORE, the Service Corps of Retired Executives. These are people in retirement who advise people who want to start a business. Many of their services are free and they will help you with all the questions that you have about starting a business and maintaining that business with insurance, attorneys, and accounting.
I didn’t have any experience when I started my business. I had been in the military and then I worked for the National Security Agency. When the National Security Agency suggested I start my business as an independent contractor, I said I had never run a business.
I was uncomfortable with the idea, so they sent me to the SBA. Over a year-long period, I went to classes and did the things they suggested.
It helps to have a coach or consultant in the area of business that you’re learning.
You can work with us if you want to learn more about content marketing.
Create more opportunities with content marketing and reach out to connect with your audience.
You can help improve lives.
Hearing from just one person who’s watched your show, who says you have helped me a lot, is enough motivation to keep on doing it for another six months.
An important part of building your business is understanding marketing in this era of digital content production and distribution.
Doing marketing this way means your only cost is your time.
Schedule a video chat with us at consulting.AGKMedia.Studio and we will discuss your vision and answer any questions you have about content marketing, producing livestream videos, podcasts, blogs, social media posts, books, courses, and any kind of digital product.
We can help you get started.
Shelley Carney: We can do it. You can do it.
I do four shows a week. I do three podcasts a week. I do two blogs and two newsletters a week. If I can do all of that, you can do one show a week.
Don’t think that you can’t do it because you’re over a certain age. Anybody can do this.
Are you struggling to create and convert leads? Are you overwhelmed when you think about how you can stand out in the online market?
This blog is for you, the encore entrepreneurs, coaches, consultants, thought leaders, and speakers – how do you gain visibility and credibility online so your ideal clients hear your message and reach out to connect with you? Expert livestreamers, Shelley Carney and Toby Younis of AGK Media Studio provide tips, tools, and strategies for creative, fun, and effective content marketing through weekly livestreaming, podcasting and blogging.
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