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By Stan Hinden | January 2008

Let me introduce myself. My name is Stan Hinden and I am a retired newspaper reporter, editor and columnist. Before I retired, I worked at The Washington Post as a business writer, covering the financial markets and writing about stocks, bonds and mutual funds. It was fascinating work and I rarely, if ever, thought about retirement.

When I turned 69, however, the idea of retirement began to creep into my consciousness. My wife, Sara, had retired from the General Electric Co. three years earlier. We also had recently down-sized, moving from a five-bedroom house to a two-bedroom condo in a retirement community. And we were talking about doing some traveling. It seemed like a good idea to do so while we were still healthy and energetic.

So, in the spring of 1996, I walked into the office of my editor at the Post and announced my decision to retire after 23 years at the paper and some 40 years in the news business. It turned out to be my lucky day. Before our meeting ended, the editor invited me to write a new, first-person column about life in retirement.

I agreed to do it and wrote the Post's "Retirement Journal" column for the next seven years. During that time, I had the good fortune to write a book, "How to Retire Happy. The 12 Most Important Decisions You Must Make Before You Retire." The book was published by McGraw-Hill and is now in its second edition.

Writing the retirement column turned out to be one of the most challenging assignments of my journalistic career. I quickly discovered that I knew very little about the subjects that are vital to retirees: Social Security, Medicare, medigap, long-term care, pensions, 401(k) rollovers, required IRA withdrawals, and more.

I also realized that, in my own retirement, I had made a number of mistakes involving my Social Security, pension payments and investments. My missteps could be traced to a single cause: I retired without taking the time to learn what I needed to know to prepare for this major step in my life.

And because I was writing a first-person column about my experiences, my discoveries and mistakes were revealed in a very public way. Fortunately, I drew considerable sympathy from fellow retirees who were eager to share their experiences and their thoughts about the pitfalls of retirement.

As the years rolled by, my focus moved beyond the basics of Social Security, Medicare and 401(k) investments to the life-changing aspects of retirement. Like most retirees, I was deluged with information about saving and investing during retirement. But there was relatively little information about how to make the transition from a life of work to a life without the daily demands and professional challenges of a full-time job.

On the face of it, it sounds like it should be easy to quit your job, give up your daily commute and get away from all those e-mails, memos and meetings. And I am sure that, for some people, it truly is easy to leave and never look back.

But for many people, retirement creates a loss of the identity that was an essential part of their work and careers. Indeed, until they leave their workplace, they often do not realize how much they will miss their colleagues and friends.

Thus, I believe, a happy retirement depends, in part, on how well a retiree can replace the sense of shared purpose and the social connections that were an integral part of his or her career. And that, in turn, means that preparing for retirement requires you think carefully about what you are going to do for the next 20 or 25 years.

And so, in this new column, I plan to write about how you can prepare for retirement or, if you're already retired, how you can improve your retirement experience. I approach the subject not only as a journalist and retiree but also as a husband, father and grandfather.

For me, retirement has been a unique journey into the most challenging part of life. I hope you will let me travel with you as you make your own journey into and through the retirement years.

Copyright 2008, Stan Hinden. All rights reserved. Reprint permission required.

The author was compensated for writing this article by AARP Financial.