Ed Zinkiewicz: NAVIGATING LIFE'S SIGNIFICANT CHANGES | The Tyler Wagner Show #1099

All right, everyone, welcome back to another episode. Today we have Ed Zinkowicz with us. So welcome to the show, man.

Thanks. I'm glad to be here.

Thanks for joining me on this one. First thing, if you can, just tell us a little bit more about you and what you do.

Well, my name's Ed Zinkowicz. As we just discussed, the last name looks a lot more complicated than it is, but I fancy myself as an aging in life strategist. For the past 10 years since I retired, I've helped retirees meet the challenges and surprises of retirement. These days, I'm dealing a lot more with the problems and challenges of aging. And so I've, I've done a whole variety of things from webinars to podcasts to books to a variety of things. I'm writing currently a book on downsizing and expect a couple more smaller tomes here in quick succession, as quick as I have time for anyway.

That's awesome. Yeah, got it. Got it. Or sorry, was there anything else you wanted to say there?

No, that's fine.

Okay. So I guess first question. So before you, what were you doing before you retired? Like, what was your main career before this?

I was a systems analyst programmer.

Oh geez. All right, that's interesting. Um, and you did— that was your whole career basically?

Pretty much. I, I did a whole variety of things in that career. Most people think of that as a kind of a techie, nerdy sort of thing, work with the inner— the innards of the computer and don't talk to people. And you know, you get it. Um, you know, he's a nerd in the corner there, and I was never a nerd in the corner. A systems analyst goes out and talks to people and finds out what kind of problems they're, they're dealing with, then figures out how the computer might be able to help them and teaches the computer how to do that, and then helps the user get to the place where they're functioning better because of of what we did together. So basically, I work with people to discover their needs and help where they're going. So in retirement, I haven't done anything different. I'm just focusing on something else. I'm not hunting for computer problems anymore or business systems that will solve problems. I'm not trying to get inventory from A to B. I'm trying to get people from C to D and help them over. Over the hurdles and challenges that are there for them. I discovered long ago there are 3 real big surprises for people when they retire. Number 1, they're going to miss work. Yeah, I know.

Say what?

What do you mean miss work? I'm retiring. I can't do that. Well, what you're going to miss is the benefits that work give you. So for example, I always thought being a systems analyst was a very creative job, and so I wanted to do something in retirement to replace that. I wanted to be able to continue being creative, and I— and by and large I've done, I've done that. So I'm very happy with that. There's a lot of other things. There's 16 or 17 other things that are can be missed. You might miss people greeting you in the morning. How is your day? If these are the only people you talk to, yeah, you're going to miss that kind of contact. You might miss somebody telling you where to go, when, when a boss coming up with a project for you. Some people miss regular schedules. Lady told me once is, um, if I don't know what I'm going to do tomorrow morning, I'll just lay around in my jammies all day. Yeah, and that may not be very productive. So that's number one. Number two is you're going to need a whole new set of friends. Now think about that. You just turned around and you left work. What'd you leave back there? All your friends. Um, so what are you going to do? Now, you know, in this day and age when a lot of people are working remotely anyway, that may not be the biggest problem there is anymore. If you— only people you ever see are on Zoom, you have a different problem. So, but one of the things that you may that is important in that process is that you may miss the water cooler. There's no standard place where everybody comes and joins. In some companies, it is literally a water cooler or a cafeteria or a laboratory or a workspace or a conference room where you can meet people regularly and engage and interact. And if you don't replace that, you know, you're sitting in your living room, you're looking out the front window, There's not a lot of people walk through there uninvited, I hope. And so you're, you're, um, you have to go out and find them. So how do you do that? And the third thing is aging takes time. Retirement's going to last a whole lot longer than you ever thought it would. That's part of what aging takes time means. It could be 20 or 30 years. And most people tend to start retirement, kick it off like it's vacation, which is, there's no problem with that, except vacations always end. What are you going to do after that? So, and the other thing is that along the path, there are new challenges that aging brings. And so you're going to spend more and more of your time taking care of the consequences of your aging. Tomorrow's my physical therapy day. We're gonna get my back stronger finally. And so I have to spend more time just so I can do that stuff. And so there you have it, the kind of surprises that I've, I've talked about for a decade.

Yeah. Or sorry, go ahead.

No, go ahead.

Oh, okay.

Okay. Yeah.

I was gonna say, it's actually, I think for most people that the first one is surprising for me. It actually isn't. I read this book called The 4-Hour Workweek, and when he talks, it's a guy, Tim Ferriss wrote the book. I'm not sure if you've ever heard of it. It's like a— it's okay. You have? Awesome. So he talks about the idea of like mini retirements. And when I, when I read that, that clicked for me a lot more because I, I don't know when I've been running my company for 13 years now and I have definitely realized that I don't think I ever want to like fully retire just because I don't know what I would do like with all of the time. So even like yourself, right? Like you retired from your, you know, your main career, but you're still working, you know, somewhat, right? And it's just because it's like, I don't know, there's all the pleasures in the world, but without work, I don't know what I would do. Like I need some structure, you know, I need something like.

I think some people can get, get by without being mentally engaged or without being purposely and purposefully engaged, without being— having things to do that are meaningful. But I'm not one of them. Yeah. So I talk a lot to people like you who, who agree with me and, and can want to find out what else and how else they can be engaged. I love doing interviews and I've done a lot of interviews with folks about how their retirement goes, what they do in volunteering and so on and so forth, because I'm innately curious and I love to go out and find out what you're doing and see how that plays out. So I agree.

I'm the same way. That's actually why, like, the podcast for me is honestly more of just a passion thing. Like I've done now, I'm over 2,000 interviews in like 4 or 5 years I've been doing it. I know it's— I'm really curious, but no, I love your angle. Like you could have— and I apologize if you said you have this, but if you don't, you could have a podcast where you only interview people in retirement and see, like you said, like what they're up to and what they're doing. I think that would be really interesting. I also had an idea. I don't know why I'm telling you this. I just feel intrigued to tell you this. I had an idea of doing a podcast that was called 70 and Up. And only interviewing people that are 70 or older just because they've like fully— and I mean, you still obviously still have more time after 70, but I feel like 70 and up, you're just like, you've lived a long life. Like you, you, you definitely have stories, like without a doubt. Like, so I don't know, I might do that at some point. That'd be fun. But so tell me more, the book you said, and just, that's actually the business I run. We help people with books so that intrigued me. What's the book about? And then what, tell, just tell me more about the book. I'm curious.

Yeah. Well, basically it's two parts. Yeah. And it's based on my experience. We just moved to retirement community and we left a home that we were in for 46 years. We downsized to a two-bedroom apartment. So we had to take a lot of stuff and either eliminate it or move along. Yeah, shrink it, right? There, um, I didn't find a shrinking machine, but if you do, let me know. Yeah, it'd be kind of— really, wouldn't that be convenient? Just, uh, I'm done with it, let's put it back in the cabinet about that big and get it out when we need it. That, that doesn't happen.

Sorry about that.

Downsizing is a lot more problematic than that.

Yeah.

So in any event, we discovered a couple of things and we set a couple of rules. Rule number one is you got to get rid of stuff. You can't take it all. Rule number two for us was don't put it in the landfill. We got enough stuff in the landfill. We don't have to contribute old furniture. Or stuff, you know, the 12 extra pencils you got in the back drawer, more than the 12 you're going to use in the next 10 years. So, so, uh, what, what can you do and where do you put all that stuff? The other part of the business about downsizing and moving has to do with how fast you do it. And how you calibrate the loss. And so I tell some stories about different people and different ways to view downsizing. One is I call the big loss. You take all your stuff, get rid of it in a month. My, my mother did that. I watched her do that. She had a, an estate sale And I was there. She called me up, says, I want you to come to the sale. I said, the sale of what? The house. The house I grew up in? Yeah, that's the one. And, uh, this first I'd heard she was moving, first I heard. And she, uh, she had an auctioneer there and she sold had all her worldly possessions strewn out across the yard and in the garage and the house, and people came in and the auctioneer sold them off. At the end of the day, sold the house. Boom.

Wow.

Now she had taken out what she wanted to put in a bedroom, two-bedroom apartment, and so it lasted a little bit longer than that one day. But at the end of the day, she said There goes all my pretty stuff. Yeah, what she hadn't counted on was the loss hitting her of all that stuff that she— you know, it was not just the stuff, it's the memories of raising two kids there, the memories of seeing 2 foster kids there, couple of husbands, uh, you know, a career. She was there for nearly 50 years. Wow. And she was leaving it all behind. So, and she was doing it in a mighty hurry. She had no way of actually processing what you're gonna— the stuff that might be more meaningful than not. Yeah, with that. So we wanted to be able to deal with that a little better. The other thing was, uh, the model that we sort of emulated was my wife's aunt. She moved from a house where she and her husband raised 6 daughters to a 2-bedroom apartment, a condo, I guess, and then a 1-bedroom apartment, and then a studio apartment, and then she went to a room in her daughter's house where she died. Her daughter was a nurse, so it was kabump, kabump, kabump, kabump. And what she did was to be able to isolate those things that she was going to get rid of this time. And she could say for some of those, well, I'm going to get rid of it. No, I'll keep that for a bit, because she knew eventually she would, and she might be more ready for it next time. So, you know, those things had meaning for her too. That house was, you know, listening to the sounds of the kids, not in the inner memory of the kids that ran through that house. They were all girls. My wife wouldn't introduce me to any of them until after I married her because they were all— each one's prettier than the last one, and they all had boyfriends in and out of there. And I guess the place was a zoo. But that's memories that were there of the jokes. And then her husband was a storyteller that was— he was remarkable. And all that she could let go of in pieces. So furniture they got in Guam, the furniture, you know, you get the idea.

Yeah.

So how are you going to treat your loss if you move? So that's the first part of the book. Second part of the book is what do you do with this stuff? And I wanted to, I deal with that in 3 different categories. One is the stuff nobody wants. And this is the stuff that might most often end in the landfill. We have several examples of that. One of them is, uh, is called hard styrofoam. If you, you know, those nice bookcases that are pictured behind you. There. I don't know if I'm looking at a real picture or a background, but there's bookcases there. You got those out of— somebody got those out of a box, and that box had a lot of movement, little, little parts, and they were all held tight in position by Styrofoam. And it's hard Styrofoam. The stuff you get coffee in at the drugstore or whatever is soft Styrofoam. There was a place we found that takes— here's their business model. They take Styrofoam in on one end and they put Styrofoam out on the other end. Isn't that a nice business? So you take it all in, you chop it all up, you push it in big pressure cookers, and you put them back and you make more hard Styrofoam to order for the people who want it. And we took it there so that they can make Styrofoam out of it. Now it didn't keep it out of the landfill, but it kept it out for at least one cycle. So hard to get rid of stuff. You have a drawer, I'm betting, that's got paperclips in it somewhere.

Yeah, yeah.

Your partner or children or office supply place probably has another supply of paperclips. Between my wife and I, we had 4 different supplies of paperclips. And that's what you discover when you do the downsizing trick. You don't— we're never going to use that many paper clips. So we found a place that takes, uh, toilet rolls, that takes old notebooks, that takes paper, that takes construction paper and pens and pencils and blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah, and runs essentially a supply cabinet for teachers. Or a craftsman. So if you want to come and go to, um, Turnip Green Creative Reuse, you can take a lot of miscellaneous stuff that other people will go find useful. And so there's a category of things that are stuff that, that, um, yeah, well, that's a category of things that are really would be end up in the landfill if because we don't have room in the apartment for all of those collections of office supplies. And then the second category is stuff that we cherish, um, but are duplicates. So we have tools that we had, you know, you Over time, you get 3 hammers and 4 pairs of pliers and on and on. You don't need all that stuff, particularly don't need the stuff in an apartment when there's a maintenance person that's going to fix everything. So you have things that you don't need. And then there's stuff that we, uh, value highly, but we still can't take. So we had stamp collection, for example. My wife was avid stamp collector in her younger years, and what do you do with those? We found a stamp collector who was perfectly happy to go through them. He says, oh look, that's, that's a such-and-so from somewhere. That was done in umpty-ump year, and there's 3 of them of that color, and blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. Who knew there was so much to know about stamps? But anyway, so, uh, stamp collections or glass collections or Hummelware or statuary or whatever. We had— I had my office decorated in— I love Egyptian art, so I had a lot of parchment paintings. I must have had, oh, 2 dozen of them. Eventually, and we couldn't take all of those. So I got two of them over there on the wall, and there's a couple more in the closet. And, and, uh, and if I want to, I want to redecorate, I can take those two down and put the other two up. So, but the, the remaining ones went to people who would value that stuff. So it's a It's a list of the kinds of things that we took that were, that are valuable, but we had no room for. So basically it's a, it's a primer on how to get started with that, how to think about it. Where can you start with your downsizing? Where do you go? How do you find things we had? And, and also it's a, to get you mentally prepared. It takes a long time to get rid of 46 years worth of stuff.

Oh yeah, I bet. Yeah.

So, and if it's particularly— if you have the two rules that we wanted, we want people to be able to cherish the stuff we did. Why, why would we want to throw it up, throw it out? Um, so basically is how do you find new homes for stuff? And then there's the hard things. We had two cats we had to get rid of, and Actually, we had one cat, Raleigh, and one day Raleigh brought home a friend, Sydney. Sydney was basically feral. But how do you get rid of two cats? Because we couldn't— we could move, we could take animals with us here, but they have to be house cats. And these two, no, no, no, no. So it took the better part of a year or half a year to find a good home, and we did. Some lady with a goat farm has lots of cats and dogs and goats, and, and, um, I'm— yeah, those two cats are happy as clams. So, uh, they have folks to play with and place to do it in, and they're just great. So how do you cherish your stuff when it's not going to be your stuff anymore? So that's what the book's about.

Interesting. And how are, um, just for our audience, because a lot of them are authors or want to be authors, what's the process that you're doing to like, uh, to write it? Uh, like, do you have publisher? Just stuff like that. I'm just curious, the process you're, you're doing to complete it.

No, I've, I've, I've not famous enough to go say, publisher, you really ought to be interested in me. And so I've never done that route. I've self-published.

Got it.

And, um, my wife self-published a book. I had 3 books self-published when we started this retirement business that dealt with those 3 concerns, by the way, that I mentioned. And, uh, this time the process is I'm a little wiser because I know that I'm going to want to have speeches about certain elements in this, like the big loss versus the little loss. And I know that I'm going to want to do some videos. So I started with the most complicated one in designing the scripts. With the slides for a webinar or a presentation, and I will create videos about the different elements. And so, got it. It's, uh, what I, what I have is presentation scripts that'll be videoed. I use a program called Prezi Video.

Oh yeah, I've heard of that.

Yeah. And, um, it, um, lets me sit here and the slides are right here and they go off the screen so that the people can see me and concentrate on what I'm saying. And the, and the picture accents what it is. Sometimes it's a, it's a word or two rather than a picture. But in any event, those scripts are done. And now I'm scraping the copy and putting it in a book and putting in selected pictures. And I'll do the same probably for blog posts and other kinds of things so that once the book is ready, we'll be able to direct people to the video, um, and the book and so on.

That's awesome.

So it, it goes— I, I visualize it as in terms of visual content down to verbal content.

Yeah. Got it. Got it. I guess, like, last question I'm thinking of for you is, what's your— is this like you helping people with retirement and then with your book? Do you have any plans after that, or do you think this will be kind of like your last career focus? Like, is this what you're trying to expand, or is there going to be something after that, you think?

No, I'm about done. Need to retire.

I love it. That was the best response to that.

I, um, retirement, I vision is having 3 parts. It's, uh, go-go, slow-go, and no-go.

Got it.

And go-go You know, my wife and I hit with both feet running. And I wrote the books and I did the podcast and I did the da da da da da. And I had essentially a 2-year cycle where I started something else. I did 2 years of webinars, 2 years of book writing, 2 years podcast. And we spent this last year moving to an assisted living, not assisted, we had independent living facility. Next door to assisted, next door to nursing, so that we have a place to transition. And what I've found is we moved here because we were literally slowing down. My wife had a— broke her ankle on January 2nd, 2020. She just about got done with that, and we had COVID. And then the following year I had a hip replaced, and we began to talk about— we've been talking all along about when we're going to retire, when— what's our projection for needing a different kind of living environment. And we, you know, we have a single-story house, we had a walk-in shower, we, we did everything in that house to make it safe, geyser safe, where we would have less chance of falls and all of that. And so that's, um, but at the same time, I couldn't get my wife out of the house in a wheelchair and feel safe about it. I thought I could probably— she was too heavy. I'm, I'm suffering from muscle loss. Same thing you're suffering from as you age. Yeah, it's just that I have a— I had a head start on you. And, um, we had 2 steps about that big down to the porch and down to the sidewalk, and I didn't— it was winter and it was icy, and I didn't want to take a chance of dumping her headfirst off the wheelchair. Because I couldn't control it. So it was a wake-up call in terms of what our capabilities were. And having 6 weeks where you, you lie on the couch with your rear end in the air and packed in ice to make your hip heal faster, uh, is a similar kind of event. Backwards. I wasn't taking— she wasn't taking care of me. I, I was taking care of her, and then she took care of me. And, uh, just after that, our friend said, why don't you come move to where we are? It's a place called Richland Place. We're going to go there, and you, you have a 5-year waiting list. You need to get on the list. Okay, well, we added that up, and, and that matched our plan for what we thought we might need. So that made sense. We signed up. But this year, when we went to do what I call our annual checkup at the beginning of the year, they offered us an apartment. And so we went through this downsizing thing, and, um, and that's when I started writing this material because I wanted to see what the process was. I wanted to learn about it as well as I could, and I kept a list of everything we moved. So from the time we signed up to come was a whole lot shorter than 5 years. And all, all told, we were in the apartment 2 years later.

Oh wow, much—

which is a real surprise. But we, at that point, before we got noticed, that before we had the apartment, we had taken 100 sets of stuff out of the house. Now, a set of stuff might be all the electronic stuff I didn't need anymore because I wasn't doing that kind of audio recording anymore, to a, a car full of what my wife called horsey gear. Um, she had to stop riding when she broke her ankle, and so she gave up, uh, saddles and pictures and jewelry and clothes and tack and da da da da da, stuffed it in the car, found a place that could benefit from that equipment because they were helping, um, with kids who, who needed riding as a therapy. And so that's the kind of thing we did 100 times over before we got notice. And then from January of this year to end of May, we took out another 75 sets of stuff. Got it. So, um, I have this long— a printout of this long Excel spreadsheet. It does give us a handle on where it all went and why and what kinds of stuff it was and all of that.

I love that idea, actually. Um, well, I get— last question for you is, where, where can people stay in contact and stuff, especially because you have a book coming out? Um, so tell, tell us a little bit more about like websites, social medias. How can people stay in contact with you?

I have a website, it's called Retirement Kickstart, K-I-C-K-S-T-A-R-T, you know, kick, Retirement Kickstart. And, uh, there'll be, there'll be notices on there about the, uh, book when it comes out. Okay, there's a way to get a hold of me. I do coaching and counseling, help people through. I have a 4-session coaching session to get you over the tough part about starting retirement. Be glad to have people join up. And there's also a free schedule, a talk, and I can— we can decide whether there's anything I do at all that may matches with anything you need. And if there isn't, we can shake hands and go our separate ways. If there is, we can work together. But that's, that's where there'll be— there's a place you can sign up for that too. And there's a contact form at the bottom. You can also sign up for my newsletter, which comes out about twice a month.

Perfect. Thank you very much for coming on, man. I appreciate it.

Yeah, you're welcome. I enjoyed it. Um, I appreciate what you do, and I'm glad you're helping authors.