This article is reprinted by permission from NextAvenue.org. After a particularly stressful workweek, Jane Tafel told her husband, Mark, “I just don’t want to work this hard anymore.” She had a rewarding job as vice president of development at a community and workforce nonprofit in Minneapolis. Still a couple of years shy of 60, she planned to work indefinitely. But she often found herself rising in the quiet hours before dawn to prepare for a full workday ahead.
Having had this realization, she and Mark, a retired middle-school English teacher in his early 60s, visited a financial planner for the first time, to see if they could move their “someday” plans forward: plans that would take them around the world to teach, work and volunteer, much as they’d lived before having children. As a young person, Jane had lived and worked in Nepal, Norway and the Caribbean island of Antigua. Later, as a married couple, the Tafels spent four years in Taipei. Mark taught English at an international school, and Jane was the first Montessori teacher and the educational director at a preschool in Taiwan. When t …