“The quality, not the longevity, of one’s life is what is important.” – Martin Luther King, Jr.

Robert Paschal, a 90-year-old gentleman in Bishop, CA recently wrote a letter to Fortune in response to their Retirement issue. He offers his list of retirement ideas for non-billionaires:

1. Early retirement is for the birds except for people who have stopped thinking.
2. Don’t buy more house or more motor vehicle than you need.
3. The best route to financial security for most people is saving more. As the New England adage says, “Try not to lose any money.”
4. One of the best investments people over 70 can make is charitable gift annuities — partially tax-deductible gifts that yield partially tax-exempt high-interest income.

Mitch Anthony in the New Retirementality explains that, “Most people don’t really want retirement as we know it. What they want is freedom to pursue their own goals and interests.”

“When people talk today of retiring, they are rarely speaking of retired living; they are usually speaking of emancipated living. They want to be free to pursue their goals, at their pace, and free to find a sense of balance in their lives.”

But this requires a shift in the retirement paradigm and how we prepare for it. “Retirement is an unnatural condition. Even if you can afford to retire, the worse thing you can do is withdraw completely from the race. Retirement is an illusion because those that can afford the illusion are disillusioned by it and those who cannot afford the illusion are haunted by it.”

Back to Robert… at ninety, he definitely is experiencing emancipated living, “I have the travel bug — Europe, Asia, Africa, Central and South America. When I die before too long, I’ll have been there and done that, time and again.”