How to Retire Without Losing Your Mind

A Survival Guide for Your First Year of Doing Whatever It Is You Do Now
By Nate Quigley

Somewhere in America right now, a man is standing in his kitchen at 9:15 on a Tuesday, fully dressed, coffee in hand, with absolutely nowhere to be. He has been retired for eleven days. He has already organized the garage. He is now staring at the lawn.

This book is for him, and for everyone about to become him.

How to Retire Without Losing Your Mind is a genuinely funny survival guide for the strangest year of your working life: the first one after it ends. Sixty unscheduled hours a week. A break room that dissolved overnight. A spouse whose kitchen you just moved into. A stranger at a party asking what you do, and a sentence that no longer works. Underneath the jokes is real machinery: the moves that turn a shapeless calendar back into a life you actually chose.

Inside, you'll learn:

• Why the retirement party promises are sincere and wrong, and what to save before you leave
• The honeymoon phase has a clock on it: what to build before it runs out
• A new answer to "So, what do you do?" that works at parties and in mirrors
• The 168-hours problem, and the anchor trick that gives a week its shape back
• The hobby gauntlet, the ninety-day rule, and why crooked bookcases are the tuition
• Your spouse did not retire: territory, treaties, and the six words that save marriages
• The money feelings that arrive when the paychecks stop, and the fence that quiets them
• Nate's First-Year Survival Sheet: the whole book on one page

Every chapter ends with The Sane Person's Notes: the advice, minus the jokes.

You have a third of your life left and nobody is scheduling it. That should feel like flying. Here's how it does.

Pairs with its companion volume, How to Deal With a Spouse Who Just Retired, written for the person whose house you just moved into. Buy both. One of you is going to need the other one anyway.