The Retirement Café Podcast

Over the last couple of months, I've shared a few podcasts from our series called 'The Age of Resilience', designed to support and promote the agenda of The Longevity Week, which took place in November.

This week I am delighted to continue the conversation on resilience with my guest Anna Dixon. Anna is Chief Executive of The Centre for Ageing Better, whose mission is to help everyone enjoy a better later life.

With a wealth of experience in social policy and years of observing our ageing population, Anna has written a book called 'The Age of Ageing Better? A Manifesto for our Future'; a book that encourages us all to take action against the negative attitudes towards ageing.

Throughout the pandemic, Centre for Ageing Better also undertook research to find out the impact that COVID-19 and its consequential lockdowns have had on those between 50 to 70.

In our conversation, we chat about the much-needed work that the Centre for Ageing Better does, actions that need to be taken to help us live better for longer and the results of the research undertaken by the Centre for ageing Better to understand how COVID is impacting people between 50, to 70.

Before Christmas, we released the first episode of a new series called The 9 Accelerators of Successful Retirement Planning.

The series will cover all 9 steps of our Retirement Success Programme which include: Lifetime Financial Forecasting, Minimising Lifetime Tax, Protecting your Legacy, Estate Planning, Care Funding, Well-Crafted Investments, Asset Allocation, and Staying on Track.

In this first episode we discussed the importance of considering our life priorities.

In this episode my wife and business partner, Kathy, is back in the interviewer's chair to ask me about the second of the 9 accelerators, Lifetime Financial Forecast

In the conversation, I chat about why we should all start financially planning for our retirement, what a plan should include and start pointing you in the direction of how you can start a plan.

Tune in to hear how anyone can start planning for their retirement.

We all know about physical, emotional and psychological abuse, and we all like to think that we could spot it happening. However, one type of abuse we rarely consider is financial abuse.

This week, I am joined by my friend Michelle Hoskins, founder of Standards International, which sets standards across the globe for financial services.

Over the past year, author and speaker Michelle has branched out into the areas of mental health and financial abuse. After a few personal events over the past couple of years, Michelle undertook a mental health course to gain the skill set to be able to spot and help those who might be suffering. She then went on to bring her passion to fight abuse into the field of finance, developing a course to teach financial planners how to spot financial abuse.

In our conversation Michelle shares her motivations for wanting to be able to help anyone who might need it. She defines financial abuse and gives us ways in which we can all be there for our family and friends, business partners, or even a stranger.

In last week's episode, I took time to reflect on a few things that I have been grateful for this year. I shared some personal things, like being able to spend more time with my family over lockdown, and some global good news stories that didn't quite make it into the news - thanks to pandemic craziness.

As we head towards the end of 2020, and with the dawning of a new year in just a few days' time, I thought it'd be a good time to reflect on some of the positive discourses that have run through a number of my podcasts during the past 12 months.

I reflect on the great work that charities, such as of The Silver Line and Christchurch Food Bank have done across the country and across all kinds of sectors during one of the toughest years we have experienced.

In a time when our mental health was put to the test, I revisit conversations I had with a number of guests who showed us exactly how much exercise can impact our mental health, and our ageing process.

And I discuss the changing discourse and attitude that surrounds ageing, as more and more people are taking a positive point of view of having an ageing society.

Tune in to hear some of this year's highlights.

This year has brought with it hardship and constant struggle. We have introduced a new lexicon into our everyday vocabulary with words such as COVID, social distancing and furlough being part of our daily conversations.

But Christmas is a time for celebration and joy, so it seems right to take time and reflect on what a year it's been.

In this week's episode, I want to share with you a few personal things I am grateful for as well as a few global good news stories that you might have missed in the chaos that COVID wrapped around us.

I chat about what I got up to in lockdown and share some of the positive stories out there that were missed by the mass media.

I hope you have a great Christmas, and encourage you all to take 5 minutes to think about what you are grateful for this year.

Over the years I've helped well over a hundred couples plan for the retirement they desire - and the retirement they deserve – and during this time we've created a clear framework for what needs to happen for clients to be able to retire with confidence, clarity and choice about how they spend their retirement.

We call this the Retirement Success Programme and it's made up of what we call 9 accelerators – the areas we address when helping our clients plan for their retirement. We decided to create a series of podcasts about these nine accelerators to help you to identify any gaps in your own retirement planning.

The series will cover all 9 steps of our Retirement Success Programme which include: Lifetime Financial Forecasting, Minimising Lifetime Tax, Protecting your Legacy, Estate Planning, Care Funding, Well-Crafted Investments, Asset Allocation, and Staying on Track.

In this episode my wife and co-director Kathy joins me to discuss the first accelerator, Life Priorities.

We discuss why I feel it is important to plan for your retirement before it happens, specifically focusing on the importance of figuring out what your life priorities are and how I use the Kinder Institute of Life Planning methodology to help clients navigate their way around the endless possibilities retirement can offer.

After all, I believe that everyone deserves to live a fulfilling retirement.

Having gone straight into financial services at the age of 18, Catherine Morgan found herself in a managerial position at the young age of 28. But among the difficulties of managing those who had been in the business longer than she had, she also had the guilt that came with the £30,000 debt she had racked up.

In a time where she was suffering from low self-esteem, she believed that money could help her feel better and improve her self-worth.

After an insightful experience with her wardrobe, which helped her realise her emotions were triggering her spending in an attempt to boost her self-worth, Catherine set up her first business helping women to feel good about their bodies.

From there her entrepreneurship took flight and she now runs The Money Panel, an international company helping consumers and advisors with financial coaching; their biggest mission being to equip and prepare 1 million women to be financially resilient, reduce their financial anxiety and help them be financially independent.

Catherine also hosts "In Her Financial Shoe" a finance podcast for women, with the aim of opening up the discussion with women about finance.

Tune in to my conversation where Catherine explains how our emotions are behind all of our actions, and why money is not linked to our self-worth.

Dr Josie Perry is a Chartered Sport and Exercise Psychologist. Josie's company Performance In Mind works with those in sport at all levels – including Olympians – and sometimes people on the stage or in high profile jobs, to help them overcome their barriers to success so that they can achieve their goals.

Author Josie talks about the moment she realised just how much of a difference her mindset could make to her performance – on the starting line of her first Ironman triathlon. From this epiphany, Josie went back to university to study sport psychology and has since competed many studies around the psychology of sport and exercise.

In her latest book, Josie writes about the psychology behind exercise in retirees. Having worked with Silverfit, she has gained a valuable understanding into what gets the current generation of retirees up and exercising regularly.

We discuss how understanding that the motivations and barriers to exercise differ at different stages of our lives can help us to better support people in exercise – at all times of our life.

A couple of weeks ago we shared the first in a series of podcasts designed to support and promote the agenda of The Longevity Week, which took place between the 9th and 13th of November. The title of this series is 'The Age of Resilience', which was the theme of this year's event.

The Longevity Week is an initiative created by The Longevity Forum, whose co-founder Professor Andrew J Scott was my guest on the 100th episode of the podcast, discussing his best-selling books, which include The 100 Year Life. The aim of The Longevity Week is to promote dialogue and test ideas on the future of longevity.

So I'm delighted this week to share the second episode in this series with my guest Patrick Thomson. Patrick works for the Centre for Ageing Better and heads up the age-friendly employers programme. His focus is upon addressing ageism in the workplace and supporting employers to become age-friendly.

Having held roles previously in government Patrick is well placed to discuss the ageing agenda with regards to our working lives.

Tracy Blick is the Managing Projects Coordinator at Christchurch Food Bank Plus, where I live here in Dorset.

The Food Bank helps people who find themselves in crisis all of a sudden and cannot afford to buy food to feed their families.

The demand since the coronavirus impact hit has been incredible. In 12 weeks, the Food Bank has handed out around 6,000 food parcels, the equivalent to the number they would normally hand out in a whole year.

At 50, Tracy is the youngest amongst her team of 38 volunteers, most of whom are retired.

We chat about the different roles the volunteers adopt depending on their skills and experience, why they get involved and how she teaches that we should never underestimate the power of that first tin the volunteers hand to people in need. It's often the first step on the journey to a better place.