I do think that we have a tendency to kind of want to fall back on how our parents did retirement

or how the people around us are pursuing retirement.

But it's a really lovely life stage to take a step back and think about what you're going for

and create a retirement plan that's very customized to what you want to do.

I'm Robert Brokamp, and that was Christine Bens, Director of Personal Finance at Morningstar

and the author of How to Retire, 20 Lessons for a Happy, Successful, and Wealthy Retirement.

In this rebroadcast of an interview that first aired last November, Christine and I discuss her book

and some of its main takeaways, including updated research on safe with jaw rates, right age to claim

Social Security, whether retirement is actually good for our health, and the value of being a weirdo.

So, Christine, your excellent new book is a series of interviews with 20 experts, each of

whom have some sort of lesson about some aspect of retirement planning.

So even though I'm interviewing you for this episode, I sort of feel like I'm actually

interviewing a panel of experts and you're the spokesperson.

That's a good way to think about it.

That's how I've been thinking about representing the book because I do not want to take

ownership for all of the great contributions in the book.

They really belong to the people that I interviewed.

And frankly, that's something I really liked about the project, sort of the humility.

I don't have to deal with my own imposter syndrome and pretend to have all the

answers about things that are not right in my wheelhouse like health care planning and retirement

or, you know, estate planning, things like that. It leans on external experts. And so I really liked

the, you know, sort of humility that that suggests. Well, you definitely included many of the people who I respect the most when it comes to

...