R.I.P. for an early-retirement pioneer

L. Rust Hills, the former Esquire fiction editor who died on Aug. 12, was the author of, among other books, one called “How to Retire at 41,” based on his own experience in doing just that.

Although basically a humor book, it offers the most insightful discussion I’ve ever read about the tricky transition from 9-to-5 routine to the structurelessness of retirement. Hills’s answer, in part, was to create elaborate, multicolored to-do lists for himself, which he kept on a clipboard. “Once or twice a visitor would ask me if he could have a list he particularly admired,” Hills recalls in his book.

His eventual solution, though, may be even more instructive: He went back to work. —Greg Daugherty

PS: Some of our advice about early retirement (and reasons not to) here.

Greg writes the “Retirement Guy” column each month in the Consumer Reports Money Adviser newsletter.