10 Ways Retirement Has Completely Changed in 30 Years

Ready For Retirement

James Conole, CFP®

Investment Planning, Bonds, Education, Stocks, Cash, Business, Dividend Investing, Retirement Planning, Retirement, Investing, Tax Planning

5 • 706 Ratings

🗓️ 14 October 2025

⏱️ 12 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Forget the gold watch and glide path to the couch. Retirement has been rewritten. In this episode, James walks through the 10 biggest shifts redefining life after work—and how to replace outdated rules with a plan that’s practical, human, and built for how people actually live today. From the mindset shift away from Depression-era scarcity to using money as a tool for a richer life, this episode explores how to align spending with values so every dollar supports health, connection, and meanin...

Transcript

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0:00.0	When you think about retirement, do you think about what your parents or even your grandparents
0:03.4	experienced? Well, the reality is retirement today looks nothing like it did 30 years ago.
0:08.4	And in today's video, I'm going to share with you the 10 biggest shifts that have happened over the last
0:12.0	30 years so that as you prepare your retirement, you can prepare for the specifics today,
0:16.6	not what things looked like 30 years ago. The first thing, though, that's different about retirement
0:21.3	today than it was 30 years ago is a psychological shift that's happened in today's retirees.
0:26.2	So think back to 30 years ago. The people who were retiring at that time were people who were
0:30.5	raised during the Great Depression era. If you were raised during the Great Depression era,
0:34.7	there was not a lot to go around. So that created this sense of scarcity.
0:38.7	That created this sense if I need to save everything I have. I don't know where my next meal is
0:41.9	going to come from. I don't know where my next dollar is going to come from. And that was ingrained
0:45.3	into everything that person started doing. Now, that served those people really well. That was
0:50.9	required to survive and to live during that time. But what it led to is those
0:55.5	same retirees not being able to fully enjoy the fruits of their labor. By the time they actually
1:00.4	retired and they were no longer living in scarcity, there was still that mindset of scarcity. And it
1:05.5	prevented them from fully being able to use, fully being able to spend much of the resources
1:09.9	they had accumulated.
1:11.4	Fast forward to today.
1:12.8	What's different?
1:13.8	Today, there's this opportunity.
1:15.7	There's this mindset shift that says, how do we actually use our money as a tool to help
1:19.0	us get the most out of our retirement?
	...

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