Mike MacMillan

I’m a writer located just outside of Chapel Hill, North Carolina. My wife Nora and I lived and worked in New York City and environs for 30 years before moving here to pursue a “simpler” lifestyle.

It didn’t turn out that way. More on that here.

Nora worked as a vice president and store manager for Bloomingdale’s for 20 years so we heard our share of Green Acres jokes when our friends found out where we were going.  But in the age of Trump, even the trashiest sitcom is running seriously behind reality. So, yes, it was like Green Acres if Mr. Haney was running a mental health hustle, renting out miniature donkeys for self-actualization purposes. If Arnold lived in a double-wide out by the County line, watching Oprah reruns all day and huffing glue. If Hank Kimball was growing mold in the dark as a first step to establishing a colony on Mars.

So more like a mash up of Green Acres and a Wes Anderson film. Cute,in a gothic way. But there are lots of good things, too. New friends, new projects. A job as an adjunct professor at the UNC journalism school, one of the country’s finest. A chance to pursue the much-maligned “second act” in American life.

My work here falls into three areas:business profiles, a running blog with ongoing life reportgage, and abbreviated chapters of my upcoming book.

The book is a “how-not-to” retirement guide that steps back to offer a view on the broader retirement crisis, one that has been made much worse by the advent of the coronavirus.

To illuminate this, I draw on my 30 years in financial services public relations in New York, much of which involved representing investment firms and other financial types. I trace the history of the 401(k) plan, which began as an obscure subsection of the United States Revenue Act of 1978 and went on to completely transform the meaning of retirement for millions of Americans. I do this through the stories of the people who have lived it — those who planned well for the future and those who didn’t. Those who were left out of the scheme (the brilliant, non-ironic U.K. term for pension plans) altogether.

“I just want to feel useful,” a neighbor told me in one conversation. A revolutionary by trade and predilection, she once stood at the vanguard an earlier generation’s search for social justice.

I nodded in agreement. “Don’t we all?” I said.

To read more, click on the link below. Let me know what you think.