You’re in the thick of reporting season, flat out trying to keep up with the news, wondering if your dividend income will be enough to live on, concerned about what might happen to interest rates, if the best is over for your bank shares, worried about your longevity risk. Or you could be discovering how easy it could be to live in foreign luxury.

Are you old enough to remember the early 1970s break-through Qantas publication, The How, Why, When and Where of Here, There and Everywhere? It was written with cheek and style that would give the present Qantas management apoplexy. Some young advertising writer called Peter Carey had a hand in it.

Time to get away for good?: A new book could send us all scurrying to the airport. Credit:Glenn Hunt

It was a perfectly timed and dangerous book, sending a generation of Australians abroad as the economics of aeroplanes finally overtook passenger ships, helping sink a 185-year tradition of the boat, starting a new tradition of ever-growing Australian international travel.

Stephen Wyatt and Colleen Ryan, journalists, authors and spouses (and friends of mine), remembered the book and set out to write something of a sequel for the How, Why, When etc generation. This, too, is a dangerous book and very nicely timed: Sell Up, Pack Up & Take Off.