At Jackson, we've created a digital retirement planning experience with you and mine.

Visit jackson.com to explore our easy-to-understand resources and user-friendly tools

that are designed to enable financial professionals and clients to plan a path to financial freedom.

Jackson is short for Jackson Financial Incorporated, Jackson National Life Insurance Company, Lansing, Michigan,

and Jackson National Life Insurance Company of New York, purchase New York.

Please stay tuned for important disclosure information at the conclusion of this episode.

Hi, and welcome to the Longview. I'm Christine Ben's director of personal finance and retirement planning for Morningstar.

And I'm Jeff Patak, Chief Ratings Officer for Morning Star Research Services.

Our guest on the podcast today is author and blogger Fritz Gilbert. Fritz and his wife retired at age 55,

and he has been writing about the experience. His blog is called the Retirement Manifesto.com,

and he also wrote a book about retirement called Keys to a Successful Retirement,

staying happy, active, and productive in your retired years. Fritz, welcome to the Longview.

Hey, thank you very much, Christine, and Jeff. I've been a long-time fan and I'm excited to be on your show.

We're excited to have you here. We wanted to talk to you because you retired early, which a lot of people aspire to do, but not crazy early.

So can you give a little bit of background on your career and how and when you decided to retire?

Sure, Christine. You know, I think mine was a pretty typical

course. I went to college, you know, liberal arts school, majored in business, got out and just

started doing the interview circuit, got a job in the aluminum business, thinking, oh, I'll do it

for a couple of years, get some experience. And 33 years later, I retired from the aluminum business.

So it turned into a very good career for me.

Basically, a corporate America career, worked around corporate headquarters the last 10 years in my

career, but spent quite a bit of time moving to sales offices, plant manager jobs, things like that.

...