In this conversation, Kerry Hannon, senior columnist and on‑air expert at Yahoo Finance and award‑winning author of 14 books, including Retirement Bites: A Gen X Guide to Securing Your Financial Future. Kerry explains why Gen X has become the “test market” for do‑it‑yourself retirement, how credit cards, student loans, and career instability have left many feeling unprepared, and why she still believes Gen X can absolutely get back on track.​

You’ll hear about the shift from pensions to 401(k)s, the squeeze of caring for aging parents while raising kids, and the very real impact of rising healthcare costs and economic uncertainty. Kerry also shares hopeful, highly practical strategies—paying down debt, using retirement calculators, working with fiduciary financial planners, and even creating a vision board—to turn anxiety into action. Along the way, Dori and Kerry explore working longer by choice or necessity, navigating ageism, redeploying your skills, and the power of multigenerational connection at work and in life.

Connect with Kerry Hannon:

• LinkedIn: Kerry Hannon
• Website: KerryHannon.com
• Book: Retirement Bites: A Gen X Guide to Securing Your Financial Future by Kerry Hannon and Jana Heron

What to do next:

• Click to grab our free guide, 10 Key Issues to Consider as You Explore Your Retirement Transition
• Please leave a review at Apple Podcasts.
• Join our Revolutionize Your Retirement group on Facebook.

In this episode of the Revolutionize Your Retirement Interview with Experts series, host Dori Mintzer speaks with Dr. Linda P. Fried, a global leader in healthy aging, about why rising longevity is a hard-won success rather than a crisis, how the shift to older populations is transforming societies worldwide, what older adults most want from later life (independence, purpose, learning, contribution, and mattering), and the many often-unseen ways older people already bolster economies and communities through work, caregiving, and volunteering, challenging fear-based narratives like the “old-age dependency ratio” and the impact of ageism and age segregation.

Key topics discussed

• The value of longer lives and demographic change: Public health advances have added decades to average life expectancy, bringing the U.S. to the brink of having 20% of its population over 65 and creating a new demographic reality shared by many countries.
• What older adults want: Global and U.S. studies show older people consistently prioritize aging in place, avoiding being a burden, maintaining relationships, having purpose, lifelong learning opportunities, respected voices in community life, and roles where they truly matter.
• Mattering, retirement, and mental health: Research highlighted in the Wall Street Journal finds many retirees feel less valued, needed, and connected, with loss of mattering predicting post‑retirement depression and illustrating how identity and health are tied to meaningful roles.
• Economic and civic contributions of older adults: Older people’s paid work and volunteering together are estimated to equal roughly 7% of U.S. GDP, while economic evidence shows older workers strengthen rather than crowd out opportunities for younger workers.
• Ageism, age segregation, and distorted narratives: Dominant policy tools such as the old‑age dependency ratio frame older adults as dependents, reinforcing ageist beliefs and obscuring real contributions, especially in a highly age‑segregated society where generations rarely mix.
• Capabilities and assets of later life: Science increasingly documents that aging can bring new cognitive strengths (complex problem analysis, values‑based judgment, breaking problems into steps), greater prosocial motivation, generosity, emotional balance, capacity for conflict mediation, and a generative drive to leave the world better.
  
  

Connect with Dr. Linda P. Fried

LinkedIn: Linda P. Fried

Learn more: Columbia University

What to do next:

• Click to grab our free guide, 10 Key Issues to Consider as You Explore Your Retirement Transition
• Please leave a review at Apple Podcasts.
• Join our Revolutionize Your Retirement group on Facebook.

After surviving a major cardiac arrest at 75 and multiple earlier health crises, journalist and author Bruce Frankel has returned to his first love: poetry. In this conversation, Bruce shares how brushes with death, a long reporting career, and a late-life immersion in poetry have shaped a renewing, spiritually grounded creative life in his 70s. He and host Dori Mincer explore what it means to say “yes” to life after illness, loss, and transition, and how attention, curiosity, and creativity can become daily practices of reverence as we age.

Bruce traces his “nine lives,” from a cancer diagnosis at 42 through early heart events to his 2024 cardiac arrest on the treadmill. As Bruce re-immerses himself in poetry after two decades away, he reflects on how aging has shifted his perspective from youthful romanticism to a more grounded, reverent love of the world. He shares how re‑reading mentors and contemporaries, many of whom are now gone, has revealed how much the poetry landscape has changed, especially in terms of voice, diversity, and themes of sickness, death, and loss. At the same time, he describes his own new project as being about renewal rather than decline, shaped by the ecosystem right outside his window: a vernal pool behind his house in Massachusetts and the “fairy shrimp” that lie dormant in the muck for years before emerging again.

The vernal pool becomes both metaphor and teacher as Bruce talks about curiosity, attention, and the invisible life that was happening in his backyard all along. He explains how learning about the brief, intense lives of fairy shrimp and their long-hidden eggs mirrors his experience of late‑life rebirth, and how showing up to write daily has invited the “muse” back into his life. Along the way, he and Dori explore the impact of near‑death experiences—for both of them—on how real and precious life feels, the spiritual dimension of attention (drawing on Simone Weil’s idea of attention as a form of prayer), and the ongoing challenge of discerning when to say “yes” to roles and responsibilities and when to step back to honor one’s creative and inner life.

Connect with Bruce Frankel

• Books:
  • What Should I Do with the Rest of My Life?
  • World War II: History’s Greatest Conflict (co-author)

What to do next:

• Click to grab our free guide, 10 Key Issues to Consider as You Explore Your Retirement Transition
• Please leave a review at Apple Podcasts.
• Join our Revolutionize Your Retirement group on Facebook.