The kind of work I do is pretty uncommon these days-- although I believe it will become much more common in the future. I'm a retirement planning speaker and coach.

I also teach at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where I'm completing a PhD in Continuing and Vocational Education. My focus is on how adults plan for their retirement stage of life. In particular, I'm interested in how people can plan for a retirement filled with prosperity, health and happiness. So I need to ask...

Are You Planning for Prosperity, Health and Happiness?

Before going back to school, I was a technical retirement plan consultant. For many years I researched tax laws, designed benefit formulas, and drafted plan documents. I managed investment portfolios, did compliance testing, and filed government forms. That was all very interesting stuff, to be sure.

But looking at the larger picture, I realized that...

Retirement Is Changing!

As we shifted away from traditional pensions to 401(k) type plans, I could see that employees were being forced to make more and more high-stakes decisions about saving and investing for retirement. But most employers and plan providers weren't giving employees the right information, taught in the right way, to really help them make good retirement planning decisions. Everyone wanted to do the right thing, but no one was sure what that was.

I decided that retirement planning education was going to become very, very important. So I quit my job to earn a PhD in retirement education. Then I discovered that there is no such thing. Even though we have almost eighty million baby boomers needing to do serious retirement planning -- and more generations to follow -- there isn't a degree in teaching people how to plan their retirement. Luckily, at Wisconsin, I was able to create one.

Retirement Education is Old-Fashioned

Any of the ideas we had about teaching people how to plan are old-fashioned anyways, because the retirement stage of life is changing so much. It used to be that when people retired, they weren't in the best of health, usually didn't live that long, and were content to live out a quiet life of leisure. They were worn out. It's a good thing that they didn't have many financial decisions to make, and received a pension check every month for as long as they lived.

But now when people retire, they're relatively healthy, will probably live a very long time, and want to be pretty active. Even more importantly, they need to make as many decisions during retirement, as they did to get ready for it. Some of the decisions are financial-- but many of them are not. A few of these decisions have very high stakes, and can be irreversible. And they only happen once in a lifetime, so people can't learn by trail and error. They don't get any practice, and need to make the right decision the first time around.

What About Your Retirement LIFE?

So for the last five years, I've been working to figure out a better way for us to plan the second half of life. Not just our retirement finances, but our retirement lives.

At the University of Wisconsin, I took courses inside ten different academic departments. That's a strange thing to do, but it was the only way to see the big picture. I took courses in everything from adult education to mass communications, and from business to sociology.

I was fortunate to also be able to study with leading professors from other universities, too. Like Martin Seligman, the esteemed research psychologist from the University of Pennsylvania, and David Cooperrider, the revolutionary organizational development theorist from Case Western Reserve. These visionaries helped me see a whole new context and process for retirement education and planning.

At the same time, I traveled around the country, studying the best retirement planners and educators I could find. I visited eighteen states, and met some of the most amazing real-world, down to earth teachers you can imagine.

So what did all that research lead to?

The Retirement Well-Being Model

At the end of all this searching, I was finally able to pull everything together into a single idea. A way to cover all the bases, and yet boil it down to a simple format. It's called the Retirement Well-Being Model. Just as you'd expect, it's pretty theoretical. You could even say it goes all the way down the rabbit hole, from a philosophical perspective. But at the other end, it's so practical and concrete that it can help you allocate your investment portfolio, decide where to live, or choose a medical doctor.

It actually connects all those parts of life into a congruent, coherent whole. Because that's what real life is like, isn't it? Connected?

The Retirement Well Being Model has been adopted by the federal government as the underlying structure for the "Retirement Readiness" educational program for federal employees. It's also being used by AARP and other employers to help structure their in house employee education programs.

Employers and individuals like the Model because it's based on what we all want -- prosperity, health and happiness. But at the same time, it integrates the heavy-duty research being conducted across many scientific disciplines. Where can you learn more about how to create retirement well-being for yourself?

What Color Is Your Parachute? FOR RETIREMENT

The Retirement Well-Being Model is also the foundation for my book: What Color Is Your Parachute? FOR RETIREMENT. (I wrote it with Richard Bolles, the original genius behind the world's most popular career guide, What Color Is Your Parachute?) The retirement book has just been completely revised and updated for 2010.

These days I'm mostly speaking at events, consulting with employers, and coaching individuals on how to plan for a retirement filled with prosperity, health and happiness. After all-- that's what well-being means.

And yes, I'm still working on finding time to finish that PhD...

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