#123 - Rethinking Retirement: Building a Life on Your Own Terms

Eric Blake: Welcome to another episode of the Simply Retirement Podcast, where we want to educate and empower women to live your retirement on your terms. I'm your host, Eric Blake, and I would not be the man I am today without the women in my life. Retirement has a very strong meaning for many of us today, but retirement as we think about it today is still relatively a new stage of life. It was just a few generations ago that most people worked as long as they could, and over the generations that followed, retirement came to follow a very familiar script. You worked until a certain age, you stopped working, and hopefully you had more time to travel or pursue other interests. That version may still fit for many people, but the definition continues to evolve, sometimes out of necessity, but sometimes by choice.

So I want to ask a question that might be a little bit unusual for a podcast about retirement, and that is, what if retirement on your terms is not retirement at all? Work can become more flexible, home can mean something different, travel does not always have to wait, and some people may never want to stop working completely at all. That's really what today's conversation is about.

I want to thank Dr. Barb Provost, co-founder of Purstrings, for introducing me to today's guest, Meg McKeen. Meg is the founder and principal consultant of Adjunct Advisors and the host of the Bound and Determined podcast, and her path has taken her from a corporate career in insurance to business ownership and a life of full-time travel. Today she joins us to talk about the choices and trade-offs that have brought her here, and what her story might encourage each of us to consider about our own next phase.

Meg, welcome to the Simply Retirement Podcast.

Meg McKeen: Eric, thanks for having me. It's so fun to be here with you today, and shout out to Dr. Barb. She's an amazing connector of humans, and I'm so glad that she is our connection point today.

Eric Blake: Absolutely. She's been a great resource, for just getting to know her, but also a number of guests that have joined me as a result of the work that she's done in introducing me to some great professionals just like yourself. So here's the big question: where are you today?

Meg McKeen: Can I show you my coffee mug? There's a little green heart and the outline of Oregon, the state of Oregon.

Eric Blake: Nice.

Meg McKeen: I'm in the capital in Salem. I'm here for about a month, and I'll be wrapping that up here in just another week or so.

Eric Blake: Very cool. Well now, Meg, this is a podcast about retirement, but as I just said in the open, the definition of retirement is continuing to evolve, and I want to give you a chance to share your story and your journey. But I would like to ask you a very important question. Given your background, when you hear the word retirement, what's the first thing that actually comes to your mind?

Meg McKeen: Yeah, it's a very loaded word, and I just appreciate a platform like this to really entertain different perspectives and different stories. I think the stories are really what connect us. But for me, it's how I learn that maybe the path that I see for myself isn't the only one, or the path that's been laid out for me. And I think retirement always felt heavy, and very like a marked moment in time that was also shrouded in mystery. All sorts of things happen according to the timelines that the government and our employers and all the gurus give us. And in many, many ways, I've turned some of those timelines on their head in my life, and retirement has felt like one more opportunity to do that.

Eric Blake: So do you consider yourself to be in a form of retirement, or what does that even mean to you? Is retirement a goal? Is it even something you think about as far as your future goes?

Meg McKeen: I mean, I'm financially responsible, I will say. So I have plans, and I have set certain things in motion to make sure that when I am of a certain age, I'm no longer out there hustling. But right now, it's the eve of my 48th birthday. No, I am not retired by any stretch, by choice or by ability. I've not met all of my financial goals yet in order to make that happen. But I have definitely taken my foot off the retirement pressure gas, if you will. So I'm making different choices with my time, my energy, how I choose to make my living, but also financially, in order to really embrace the life that's in front of me right now, not some version of it that may come 20 or 30 or even 40 years from now, which is very different than, again, what was prescribed to me as a young woman, and also through my upbringing.

You know, we're all exposed to money in different ways, and our money mindset and beliefs, they come from a real place. And so a lot of the work I'm doing now personally is giving myself permission to live my life and to create a life that really maybe looks different than what others might have thought, or I certainly thought my life would look like at this point.

Eric Blake: Well, awesome. So before we talk about some of the decisions you've made along the way and what our listeners might be able to take from them, would you mind just sharing a little bit about your background, your story, and how you actually got to where you're at today?

Meg McKeen: Yeah, for sure. You know, very traditional in the sense, at least through my lens. I grew up in the suburbs of Chicago. I'm fortunate to have come from a two-parent household. Both are alive and well and happy and living their dream up in Michigan, retired. And I'm the youngest of two kids, and college was never an option. It was always part of the plan. And so I went to a four-year school out of high school, graduated with a degree in sociology, and it was a really good job market then. There was a lot of opportunity, and I ended up, for some personal reasons, making the choice to enter the insurance industry at that point. And 27 years later, I'm still there, though I have seen the industry from many different vantage points. I started out on the carrier side in an underwriting role, moved into sales, into leadership, and then became an agent myself. And I am still a licensed agent. I don't sell anything anymore, but it sure helps from a credibility standpoint, and I also want to be aware, frankly, of what's going on in the insurance marketplace.

But the most pivotal thing, I think, that happened that set my whole mindset shift, I got married when I was young, 23, and divorced at 30. And at 30, I really became my own advocate for the very first time. I very much rolled from being a kid, a daughter, to a wife. And then at 30, I was kind of this independent one-woman show, and I had to start answering a lot of these questions on my own. And ultimately, there were some professional pivots, the leap to entrepreneurship, and then to my full-time travel lifestyle. But really, I think that decision to leave that marriage was the first in a series of moments that helped me to really establish that I am capable of making good choices for myself. And as much as I value and appreciate the opinions of the people around me, only I can know at the end of the day what's right for me, and that may not be what's right for everyone else.

Eric Blake: So here's a question related to that, because my mother was divorced at a very young age, before I was even two years old. I never actually knew my biological father. So at what point, with what you just described as far as you becoming an independent decision maker, did that start happening prior to the divorce, or was that something you felt like really took hold after you made that big decision?

Meg McKeen: Yeah, it's a great question. Definitely necessity after, but it kept me stuck, if you will, in a relationship that I knew was not right for me, and I'm sure he would admit not right for him either. But I had a lot of insecurity around money. We were a traditional couple in the sense we did not, nor do I have children, and I think that's an important layer to add to this story. That certainly adds some complexity. But we divided our chores, if you will, in the household in a very traditional sense. So I was all about the house and making sure that it felt like a home, and the gathering and the entertaining and all of that, and he had a really good eye for our finances, and so he really took the lead.

To his credit, he welcomed me into those conversations, and I just wanted no part of it. I trusted his judgment. We did well financially together, and so I thought, "Why do I need to be involved in this? I am not a numbers and math person. I am a words and feelings person," as I'm sure you can figure out already. And it really became a necessity then when we ended up separating. But before that, I would say getting the money right, really sitting down and looking at my paycheck, understanding if I left our family home, where was I going to live? I had no idea what rent cost. I had no idea what an electric bill was. I'm embarrassed to say now, but I was very checked out of what it would cost me to live my life on a monthly basis.

And I had an epiphany. It was actually in an insurance continuing education class about life insurance and annuities, and I got out a piece of scratch paper and I started running the numbers and I realized, "I can do this. It's not going to be doom and gloom and kind of worst case scenario. It's going to be hard, but I can figure this out." And that really set me on the path of, where am I going to live? What is this chapter going to look like? And then, how much money do I need to make in order... You know, we're no longer a two-income household. I'm a one-woman show in every sense of the word. And so what did that mean in terms of negotiating when it was time for pay raises and new jobs and new companies? Really becoming my own advocate. It definitely took time, but it started at kind of the tail end of the marriage, and then as I was establishing myself alone.

Eric Blake: So you've kind of taken me down a different path. Now I've got other questions popping up into my mind.

Meg McKeen: Yeah, I know. Isn't that the best?

Eric Blake: A lot of our clients are women that have experienced some of the same things. Now, a lot of times they're a little bit later in stage in life than you are, and they're in their 50s and 60s, and now the divorce has happened, or they've become widowed, or whatever the circumstances may be. But as you think back about those decisions about not being involved, what would you do differently if you... And not to put you in the same shoes, because nobody probably wants to go through that again, but if you had to do it differently, what would be different about how you would approach financial decision-making or involvement? Or what would you encourage other women to do that find themselves in that situation today?

Meg McKeen: I want to add, and I'm sure you do, a couple of disclaimers. You and I do not have a business relationship. We're not working together, nor am I in the advice giving in the financial realm business either. That said, I have a lot of grace and a lot of compassion for the woman I was then. I did what I thought was right for a lot of reasons in that season, and so definitely no shame. But if I had the gift of the perspective, which I do now, it's instead of relying on people who were more financially secure, better educated in that realm. I always felt very small. I always felt very uninformed, and there are so many resources available for us now as women to help with the most basic and essential education.

And I played dumb for, well, the opposite of dumb. I just played along like I knew what people were talking about when I really didn't understand what they were talking about. But I had a lot of my own shame around admitting what I didn't know, because I was surrounded by all of these people who did know. The other piece of it is, and this is still true for me, I am not motivated by money, and I am a business owner. You would think that every time I get the little ding from QuickBooks that I got paid, that I would have some sort of Pavlovian response, that I would light up and I would think, "Oh, yes, success. Here I am." I've never been that way. I like to have money. I like to have financial security, but I am not motivated every morning to wake up and make more.

And so it's really hard, if that's not something that really lights you up, to force yourself to get into some of those good habits, like looking at your bank account every morning or every week or every month even. I just very much had a set it and forget it mentality, because it wasn't something that I enjoyed. And if I'm being really candid, I don't enjoy it now either, but I have built systems to make it easier for myself, so that instead of it being this really loaded thing, I can actually start to create a little bit of joy within it too.

Eric Blake: Well, and I think one of the perspectives I would take on that, or thoughts is, because we do work with a number of women who are making decisions on their own, my objective always has just been to walk alongside them, help them make those decisions when there's not that other person to bounce ideas off of, or say, "Hey, what do you think about this?" Where we can kind of fill that role. And I guess as I think about that, one of the things that I think is why women make better clients than men a lot of times is because of that very similar attitude. It's not necessarily, money is not the goal. It's, well, what does money do for me? What can I do for myself? What can I do for my family? How can I share that? How can I make a difference in other people's lives? So I'd be interested in your perspective on that as well. Again, having the right systems in place is very important, but ultimately it's how does this money play a role in my life, not money itself.

Meg McKeen: I'll say it's a process. I definitely am in an interesting season. So again, I'm 48 almost, and I exited corporate America when I was 39, 40. So it's been a minute since I've been out. But I'm starting to see a lot of my peers who I palled around with during those years taking early retirement or taking the buyout, and they're starting to... They've got the second home at the lake. They've got the dream car. Many of them have kiddos going off to college. That's a season that we're in demographically. And I don't have a second home at the lake. I don't have any plans to have a second home at the lake. I don't even own a home. You know, as a full-time traveler, so many of the pieces of my life look different than they do for my peers, or than I thought they would. And so I think it's learning to be okay that that is okay for them and this is okay for me, and nobody comes out alive. That's the other, like, very obvious... Sorry if that's too much.

Eric Blake: No, no.

Meg McKeen: But we're all headed to the same place ultimately. And I had to detach from my relationship with stuff. When I was married, I had a beautiful home, got divorced, beautiful condo in Chicago, had all of the trappings that made a beautiful life, and it was, and I loved that chapter. But living now so simply and literally having what I need and nothing more is a very eye-opening experience. And what that does is it frees up all sorts of, I won't say all sorts of money, but money, to do the things like experiences and travel, and to invest in, when I do buy a thing, I'm buying the nicest version of that thing because it's the only one that I have.

And so it's really helped me with my own attachment to consumerism and capitalism and sort of all of the isms that we're stuck in many times in our society, to really redefine where I fit in that ecosystem. And it's also hard, because when you choose to go against the grain, it can be a lonely road. And in my vast network of professionals working in the insurance industry, and I still serve the industry, though I am not corporately employed, I don't know another single person who lives the way that I do. And so on one hand, it's really cool, but on the other hand, it's heavy. And it's like, man, the easier path might have been the house in the suburbs and the 2.02 kids and the cute little doodle dog. Like, that might have been the easier path. But I'm having fun and I'm having adventures, and I mentioned earlier the trust and the belief in myself. It's never been stronger. And I think as a woman who has struggled to find her own sense of empowerment, it's a really neat season to be in right now.

Eric Blake: Very cool. Well, and that's one of the reasons I'm so excited to have you on, is simply to share that it's okay to think differently, to take a different path. And I want to stay with that a little bit, because we've kind of hinted at it, but I don't think we've actually come out and said what it is, what your lifestyle actually looks like. So when you think about that decision to become what we refer to as a nomad, what first intrigued you about that lifestyle, and just what is that lifestyle? What does your day-to-day look like, or month-to-month?

Meg McKeen: Yeah. So we'll start there, logistics, nuts and bolts. So I lived in Chicago until early 2021 and made the decision to sell my home and all my things, and I thought I would travel for about six months. I would have an epiphany about where my next home was going to be. My Chicago chapter was so lovely and cathartic and healing post-divorce, but I was ready for something different. And here I am now almost six years later, and I don't have any more clarity about where I want to land, except to say that this lifestyle really suits me. It really works for my nervous system and my need for control and my love of a plan, and also helping me really heal my need to know.

I have always lived so far into the future. I joke all the time, when my ex-husband and I were married, we bought the house with the extra bedrooms. We bought the SUV with the extra row of seats for the children we never had. We were ready, but we never... We were living for a version of life that never materialized, and in many ways I kept doing that as a single woman in my 30s. And now I'm much more focused on what's happening a month from now, what's happening three months from now, maybe six months from now. But beyond that is uncertain, but I know I will figure it out. I have a lot of evidence that I will.

So essentially, I travel with my belongings in the trunk of my car, and I have been all over the country. Alaska is my last state that I have to spend some meaningful time in. And sometimes it's for a month, like here in Oregon. Sometimes it's less, and sometimes it's for work. I am often traveling from gig to gig or from event to event, and I just have a beautiful spreadsheet that lets me know where I need to be when, and what dates I haven't sorted out yet, so I don't miss something. But that's kind of the logistics.

How I got here I mentioned earlier. You know, there's sort of a building when you start to change and move these puzzle pieces of your life around. It really does open up possibility. And so for me, leaving the corporate world, we were well before COVID then, but my business was about 18 months old when I made the decision to start traveling full time, and it was a really precarious time for me financially. The investments that I had made and my long-term savings were fine, but nothing was coming in the door new, because my business was still in its infancy, and a lot of the sorts of things that I was doing were either paused or just cut from budgets altogether. And so it was a really precarious time, and I made the decision to put my place on the market in Chicago.

I could have rented it out, but I decided I didn't want to be a landlord, and I didn't want to have the monthly responsibility. I had a mortgage, of paying a mortgage and then also paying for housing as I traveled, and so I made the decision to sell it. Was it the best decision? I don't know. But it was the right decision, and I have no regrets to let that go. And I hit the road, and I started out in Maine, and I spent a month just really healing and recovering from the energy that it takes to sell a house and all your stuff, to really purge a lifetime of memories and collections. And then I kept moving, and it's been five years of lessons in humanity and kindness and generosity and getting to know myself.

Three years ago, I was in Missoula, Montana for the summer, and I met my now partner. And so he and I travel sometimes together, sometimes separately. He's currently doing his own thing right now while I'm here, and we've got some together time coming up and then some time that we'll be apart as well. And it's been really fascinating to experience a new love in midlife, but also a new relationship with our finances and bringing that back into the conversation.

Eric Blake: So always learning. Hey, everyone. It's Eric. Hope you're enjoying today's episode. I want to take just a quick moment to share a resource I think you'll find valuable. Have you ever found yourself asking, "How much can I put into an IRA this year?" Or, "How much can I earn before my Social Security gets reduced?" Those are the kinds of questions that come up all the time, and the answers change, often more than you think. That's why we created a free two-page tax and retirement planning cheat sheet, updated for 2026, with the key tax, Social Security, and retirement numbers all in one place. You can download it right now at thesimplyretirementpodcast.com/retirementcheatsheet. It's a simple reference you can keep handy whenever questions come up. Now, back to the episode.

We always talk about, or a lot of times I'll talk about, practicing retirement. So as somebody's getting within that five years or less, and especially within those last couple of years before actual retirement, talking about practicing both financially, but also what are the things you want to do? Do you really enjoy the thing? You might say you want to do something, but do you actually enjoy that? And maybe you should start working on that now. If you're going to play pickleball, start taking some pickleball lessons, right? If somebody was thinking about a different type of lifestyle, whether it's something like what you're doing with the traveling, or just something a little bit different, part-time work or whatever it might be, would you recommend practicing, or is it more like just dive in?

Meg McKeen: Well, I'm a dive in. Like, I need pressure in order to do most things. I need a deadline. I need my back against the wall. This is a big shift. This is a big lifestyle shift, as is the shift into retirement in a traditional sense, and so be gentle with yourself would be the wisdom there. But a lot of us, you know, if you have the flexibility to work remote, you can absolutely ask the neighbor to check in on your house, shut the front door, and then go somewhere for a month.

And a month to me is the minimum that you need to really get to know a place, and I choose to live like a local. So I'm not staying in luxury high-rise anything. I want to be where the coffee shops are and the gym and the yoga studio, and I want to walk in the park and really explore like a local would. You know, I've been to St. Louis, but I've never seen the Arch. I've been to South Dakota, but I've never seen Mount Rushmore. And I will. It will happen in my lifetime, but I'm not a tourist in this life. This is the way that I am living, and so I know a lot about local grocery stores. If you have any questions about what the best grocery store is, I've been to all of them around the country. It's wild.

But I would say, yeah, give yourself permission, and maybe you're doubling up your expenses for a month. It's okay. It's an investment in your future. You know, maybe you get where you think you want to go, and you realize this is not the place for me. I'm a big energy person, and a spot can look great on a map, but the minute I get into town, I know. My body tells me if this is a good fit or not. And so just giving yourself that permission, I think, to ease into it to whatever extent.

But I see a lot of people, a lot of women in particular, who, and I think this is an important point to make, and I'd be curious what you think about this, absolutely have the means to do whatever it is that's on their heart, to start the side hustle, to take the trip, to make the investment in their life in whatever way that looks like. And there is so much fear in that scarcity mindset that if they say yes, then doom is impending. And I can be that way. I want to be a glass half full person, but I am absolutely a glass half empty. I'm always looking for the downside. But a lot of us are doing better than we think we are, particularly those of us that have sat in the corporate world and done the 4% year over year salary increase, the bonus, all the things that we do. We are doing better and are further along than we think.

And so giving ourselves the opportunity to, like, take your foot off the gas a little bit, slow down a little bit. So much of our life is uncertain, and I don't even mean, like, the how it's going to end and when part of it, but what's going to happen tomorrow or six months from now even. And being in the moment to the extent that you can, that's comfortable for you, I think is really key. And it's honestly why I talk about this stuff outwardly like I do, because I think a lot of us are waiting for some sort of permission. That is not mine to give, but I can certainly tell you it's probably likely going to be okay if you take a chance like that.

Eric Blake: Well, I'm glad you shared that. And again, one of the reasons I was so excited to have you on is a lot of what you just talked about is a lot of what our clients experience. But a lot of times it's on the other side of losing a husband. And that might again be divorce, might be widowhood. But feeling like, "Am I okay to spend money? Am I okay to do this?" When it's just you, it can be even more daunting to make those big decisions. And I feel like as a financial planner, financial advisor, I want to be skilled enough, which is why I bring great people like you on, to hopefully ask the right questions.

What is it that you really want life to look like beyond just the traditional, "Well, you're 65. You're eligible for Medicare. Retire." I want to bring more than that, but it takes asking the right questions and having experiences or hearing from people like you to say, "What are those right questions?" Because that's something I feel like I always want to improve at, and I think that's probably something of a failure of the financial services world, is lack of that knowledge or awareness of asking those questions. Especially if you are going to work with women, you have to go beyond just the money itself, right? And that's why I think what you're talking about is so valuable, being able to say, "This is really what I want life to look like." I can help put those financial pieces together, but we've got to know what you want. What is it that you really want the next five to 10 to 20 years to look like? And is it different than what other people might think?

Meg McKeen: If you even know what you want it to look like. And I think there's a lot of pressure there that we have, that we're socking it away for this magical day when all of a sudden all of our dreams come true. And I think a lot of folks don't know what they want that chapter to look like. And life is an experiment. It's a big playground, and we're all figuring it out. And I don't think building up to this sort of moment is necessarily healthy for us. I want to be playing and experimenting as I go, rather than sort of waiting for that moment.

I also, I hope, I don't think I'll regret saying this out loud on a recorded line like this, but I want to add another layer. We talk a lot about decumulation, right? There's a lot of focus in the industry to accumulate. But how do you actually, like you said, start spending what you've saved? And I want to honor, I grew up in a household where we were financially secure, but in many ways there was energy feeling like we were not. And so when I learned how to save, it was to save not for a rainy day, it was to save to never spend. And I say that with so much love and respect for my folks, who are wonderful, wonderful people and have done wonderful, wonderful things for me in my life. But it's a similar energy.

You know, our whole lives we're taught save, save, save, save, save. You can't take it out. There's a penalty. There's this shroud over the money that we've socked away for retirement. And then all of a sudden one day it's like time to spend it, but your whole body is telling you, "No, that's a terrible idea. You can't do that. And what if you run out? And what if, what if? What if you actually live to be 100? What happens then?" And there's so much uncertainty, and to me it feels the same as it did when I was a kid and I put my $20 bill in the bank and I got the little slip of paper, and I thought... It was like it went down a garbage disposal in my mind, because the energy was you save it to never spend it. And I am working every day. Saving is important. I am committed to my saving plan, but I am also committed to my spending plan. And practicing that now at 48, I am hoping, will help me sort of soften the entry into that new category when I hit that point.

Eric Blake: Oh, and I 100% agree. I mean, that's one of the things I talked about quite a bit, in saying that when you're saving, it's a completely different mindset than when it's time to spend, and you've got to think differently. And even from a financial advisor perspective, it's a different skill set. That's why I actually enjoy the work that we do so much, is because we're in that retirement income or that decumulation phase with most of our clients. And again, but it takes a level of, again, just asking the right questions, knowing how to see, how can I better uncover what's really important to this person? What do they value? What do they want their money to do for them, beyond just, "Well, you're not supposed to spend. You can't spend on this. You only get to spend so much." But those conversations can be challenging, because again, it's just a completely different mindset.

Meg McKeen: Yeah. Well, and I think having an advocate that you can talk to, like you are offering to be, practical, but also not be the squasher of your dreams. You know? I don't want to get into any one person's individual, but the trip you didn't plan for, or, I have a gal in my world who collects art as she travels, and she was on an amazing international trip, and she found a piece of art that she wanted to bring back with her. And so she called her financial guy, and he was like, "Well, if you do it, here's what this means for the future." And she said, "Great, I'm going to do it, because I'm okay knowing that that's going to shift some things down the line."

And I think there's a lot of punitive energy for some reason around spending your money. It's your money. You put it there. You earned it. You have every right to spend it. But yet there's... And I don't understand the psychology of it. That's not the lane I'm in, but I feel it, and I really want to honor that, because I think it's not, I'm sure, unique for women, but gosh, it comes up often when I'm chatting with women in my world.

Eric Blake: Well, I don't know, do you know Ellen Rogin by chance?

Meg McKeen: I don't.

Eric Blake: So she's good friends with Barb as well, but she might be a great connection for you. She's got a book called Messages from Money. And that's actually, a lot of times I'll use that as a gift for prospective clients, or even clients that are having challenges thinking about, or trying to define, what is my relationship with money? How do I think about money? How do I talk to money? That's part of what she talks about, how do you talk to money, and does money talk back to you? What does that dynamic look like? So a lot of what you just said, I think, speaks to that, and just trying to figure out how do I think about it, how can I make better decisions, but decisions that help me meet my internal why?

We're going farther than I want to. I've got so many more questions. But I also want to give you just a chance to share a little bit about the work that you're doing now, because you are doing a lot that is designed to empower women in building their own future. I would love for you to share a little bit more about that.

Meg McKeen: Thank you, and thanks again for this conversation. I don't get to talk about this stuff all that often, and so it's fun to do a little reflecting with you today. I started a podcast six years ago called Bound and Determined, and it's centered around the stories of women working in the insurance industry. And Bound and Determined has become a container, if you will, for all of the different ways that I'm attaching in relationship to women in the industry. And so the podcast is going on tour this fall. I'll be in six cities in the Midwest. We're recording episodes live in front of a studio audience, if you will. And then I'm hosting a few retreats this fall as well, and there will be more of those that come in the year that follows.

And really, the core of what I do is I help to change the way we gather in the insurance industry. So whether that's facilitating an event, hosting an event, coming in and speaking, moderating, all of those things, I believe we can do so much better in how we host events and conferences in the insurance industry, and so I spend a lot of time there. I also do a lot of writing. I have a newsletter that goes out once a month, and I write for an industry journal, a leadership column. And honestly, I've got my hands in a lot of really interesting things, but I call them my odd jobs in insurance, because there isn't just one thing I do. That's the beauty of self-employment, is I get to try things, and if I like it, I keep going. If I don't, it's a one and done.

Eric Blake: Awesome. And how can listeners, if they're interested in connecting with you, whether in the insurance industry or not, how can people connect with you?

Meg McKeen: Yeah, a couple of ways. I'm on LinkedIn professionally and personally as well, but Meg McKeen, pretty easy to find there. I'm experimenting a little bit more on Instagram with some video around my travels, and so I'm having fun with that. Meg McKeen there as well. And then adjunctadvisors.com is the website where you can find all the information about all the things.

Eric Blake: Perfect. And we're going to share all that in the show notes. So Meg, thank you so much for joining and sharing your story. If you've ever thought about the nomad lifestyle, or maybe you just wondered what a different path might look like, I would definitely encourage you to connect with Meg. She has a great follow on Instagram. I enjoy keeping up with her content on there. And again, we'll include all the links at thesimplyretirementpodcast.com. Your next phase does not have to follow a traditional script. You may not make the choices Meg made, but you can ask whether the future you have pictured, or perhaps the future others have pictured for you, is really the future that you want.

That is the end of today's episode. Please be sure to follow the podcast so you're notified when new episodes are released. And until next time, please remember, retirement is not the end of the road. It's the start of a new journey.