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By Rob Bennett

We've asked retire-early guru Rob Bennett to help teach us how to do this. Rob retired from corporate America at the ripe young age of 43, blazing a path for himself and his family to a happy early retirement. What in blazes can we learn from him? A lot!

Passages
Retirement should be a time of additions to your life, rather than subtractions from it. You're making a transition, which can be difficult. Think back to earlier life transitions -- the first day of kindergarten, the first day of college, the first full-time job, the beginning of a marriage, the birth of a child. Each of these changes brought upheaval, and each generated some measure of fear combined with excitement. Entering kindergarten meant making new friends, but it also meant letting go of routines that became comfortable in the pre-kindergarten years. Such as, say, crying every time you parted from your blankey.

It's the same with retirement. For most of us, leaving the workplace means letting go of a lot of good things -- the sense of accomplishment that comes with meeting a challenge, friendships formed with people sharing the "foxholes" with us, the recognition we receive through promotions and pay raises, the satisfaction that comes with doing valuable work. Even jobs we complain about usually have their positive aspects. It's hard to leave those positives behind just because we have reached this turning point called "retirement."

Of course, there are a lot of decisions that accompany this transition about how we want to live our "retired" lives. Everything from how we spend our time to our sense of worth to where and how we live is affected. Once we start tossing out all the options for our retired selves, we'll not only to be able to actually map out our dreams, but plan for them.