Chapter 3 Lifestyle

Stop Waiting: Make Your Ordinary Tuesdays Better The script urges listeners not to wait for retirement or milestones to start enjoying life more, but to improve the ordinary days that make up most of life. It encourages asking whether you want to spend the next 20–30 years doing what you’ve been doing, especially after years of raising a family, building a career, and taking care of others, and re...

Making Time for Yourself: Learning American Mahjong and Finding Community The speaker encourages women to reflect on when they last did something just for themselves and shares her experience taking an American Mahjong class as a way to carve out personal time. Expecting a bright, sterile, instructional setting with many attendees, she was surprised by a dim, calming atmosphere with music, snacks,...

Here are show notes for the podcast episode: --- **Episode 4: I'm Giving Myself 90 Days to Figure This Out **Summary:** Michelle, 59, is done wondering "what's next" and decides to find out. In this first episode, she launches a 90-day experiment to build an online business from scratch — with zero audience, zero online income, and zero roadmap. No guru promises, no overnight success story. Just r...

The Happiness Curve: Why We May Get Happier as We Age Michelle Wollet reflects on why she feels happier now despite aging challenges, and shares research on the U-shaped “happiness curve,” which finds life satisfaction often dips to a low point around the late 40s (with one study across 145 countries placing it at 48) and then rebounds. She notes the curve doesn’t account for individual factors li...

Leisure Guilt: Why We Feel We Have to Earn Rest Michelle explores why she and her husband Joe feel they must “earn” rest, describing how Joe’s childhood pressure to work and avoid being called lazy carried into adulthood and how she similarly struggles to relax without guilt. She examines research linking perfectionism, achievement, and performance-based self-esteem to compulsive overworking, and...

I Have Plans: Home, Life, and Money After 50 Michelle Wollet introduces “I Have Plans,” a show for women over 50 who aren’t ready to slow down and want to carve out time for themselves while still being wives and mothers. She shares that at 59 she feels younger than she looks, doesn’t want to retire, and wants to explore new interests beyond her 41-year real estate career, including travel, decora...

The Emotional Side of Leaving a Home You’ve Loved Licensed real estate broker Michele Wollet introduces “Chapter 3 Lifestyle” by sharing a client story about “Susan,” who delayed selling for eight months despite perfect financial planning because the home held memories of her late husband and family life. Michele explains that a home is “the container of your life,” and that emotional attachment c...

The One Number You Need Before Selling: Calculating Real Net Proceeds Michele Wollet, a licensed real estate broker with 40 years of experience, explains that retirees should focus on their real net proceeds—what actually lands in their bank account after selling—rather than Zillow’s estimate, which can be off by 2% to over 6% and doesn’t account for a home’s unique factors. She outlines how to ca...

What Problem Are You Really Trying to Solve Before You Move? Michelle Wollet, a licensed real estate broker with 40 years of experience, explains that before selling a home in “chapter three,” the most important question is: “What problem are you actually trying to solve?” Using a client story about “Carol,” who almost downsized but realized she was lonely after her husband’s death, Michelle argue...

Chapter Three Lifestyle: A Sharper Focus on Real Estate Decisions After 50 Licensed real estate broker Michelle Wollet announces a shift in her show Chapter Three Lifestyle to focus more directly on the major real estate decisions people face in their 50s and beyond, noting that homeowners 55+ average over $200,000 in home equity and often lack a plan. Drawing on 40 years of experience, she aims t...