Last year I suggested a few books that I thought people might find to be great last minute gift ideas. Maybe personal finance books aren’t everyone’s cup of tea, so I thought I would add another suggestion to the list that is a lot more fun: Ernie Zelinski’s How To Retire Wild, Happy, & Free.

Before I get to this newest recommendation – here are some links to reviews I’ve written on the other books I’ve suggested. Don’t worry – these aren’t paid recommendations or anything I get compensated for in any way.  I just really like these books and wanted to share them:

• Making The Most Of Your Money, Jane Bryant Quinn
• The Millionaire Next Door, Thomas Stanley & William Danko
• Affluenza: How Overconsumption Is Killing Us and What To Do About It

How To Retire Wild, Happy, & Free is a great addition to this list. Rather than focusing on the personal finance side of early retirement, Zelinski focuses on the lifestyle change that comes with it. Written in a fun, informal, conversational style, the book offers “retirement advice that you won’t get from your financial advisor”.

I’ve read the book twice and referred back to it many times. I initially got it a couple years before I early retired. We were heading out on vacation and I wanted to start planning what our after-work lifestyle might look like. On my first read, I was a bit intimidated at the thought of building a life without work.  I re-read the book 18 months later – after thinking through a lot of questions prompted by the book – and was amazed at how far my planning had come.  I wrote about it in this POST.

Instead of being a financial guide, the book focuses on life goals, purpose discovery, and retirement activities. There is also a useful dose of retirement relationship advice and the importance of health & wellness. If these topics seem kind of heavy, don’t worry because the pages come to life with insightful quotes, entertaining cartoons, and lots of real world examples that Zelinski has collected from other Retirees.

It is those real-life examples that really make the book useful. I often notice that many retirement books (and articles) are written by people who have no personal experience with being retired. I understand that a good writer can research a topic enough to be credible, but the true sense of retiring “wild, happy, and free” don’t come through quite as authentically as they do with this book.

For convenience, here’s a link to the book on Amazon: LINK

Have you seen this book? Any other thoughts on it? Others you’d recommend?

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