In 1995 I attend the Financial Planning Association’s (FPA’s) annual conference in Melbourne. I was impressed by one plenary speaker in particular. His name was Dr Philip Randal and he was a gerantologist (someone who specialises in the field of ageing).

The main message was that, as financial planners, we needed to consider the whole person when dealing with our clients. Ideally, he suggested, we should have a group of associated professionals working together to assist our clients in the whole wellbeing - not just their financial well being. That meant linking in with doctors, psychologists, ministers and other health professionals. Easier said than done especially in large cities and where clients come from a range of locations. He also highlighted in his speech how many people retire and end up being unhappy, despite having sufficient finances.

This hit a note with me because I had a growing number of retiring clients and could see this happening to some of them.

After the conference, I contacted a psychologist friend on mine to discuss the issues around retiring unhappy. We were both interested in finding ways to help people find happiness after they left work and our research within Australia failed to find anyone or any institution providing any meaningful assistance. Sure, there were plenty of financial institution sponsored workshops offering sessions on travel, health, will making, depression, dying, funeral plans, volunteering, financial plans - not in that order!

We were looking for a program that helped people work on their individual needs so they could plan a meaningful lifestyle for themselves after leaving work permanently. We worked on putting our own program together and met on and off for several years. One evening I got an excited email from my friend to say he had discovered a program on the internet called Re-tire With A Dash. We were able to download a workshop that helped us to identify our individual needs and skills and then we were given the tools to find activities in retirement (or before) that would satisfy these needs and skills.

We were so impressed by the program that we contacted the author, Dr Alan Roadburg in Toronto, Canada and the rest is history. Since 2002 with the help of other interested business partners, we have run many workshops around Australia using Dr Roadburg’s program and the feedback has always been excellent.

Due to other business demands we were unable to focus full attention to developing the program further in Australia until now. In 2010 I retired from my financial planning practice and after a six month break decided to return my focus, but full-time, to this unique retirement lifestyle planning program.

I have never wanted to let it go, despite my other business pressures, because I believed in the principles and philosophy developed by Dr Roadburg over many decades of running and refining workshops in Canada.

So, here I am, launching my own new career of helping others to launch into their own unique Life After Work.