Eight months ago, Rosalind Hewsenian was 52, unemployed, living with her mother — at least, for the moment — and loving every second of it.
Since Ms. Hewsenian, the former lead consultant for the $245.3 billion California Public Employees’ Retirement System, left Wilshire Associates Inc., Santa Monica, Calif. last August, she’s trekked the globe, given back to the community and taken up blogging.
“I got to a point where I realized I had done all that I could or was willing to do in my career and decided that my 50s should be as adventurous as my 20s, 30s and 40s,” she wrote in a holiday letter to friends and family. So after a hike through Zion National Park and Bryce Canyon in Utah, she celebrated her 53rd birthday in Bali.
Ms. Hewsenian has also devoted time to charity work. She sits on the board of two non-profits: More Than Shelter Inc., which tackles the root causes of homelessness; and Plan of California, which runs a trust to provide financial help to the mentally challenged.
She is also a field reporter for a web log that covers “Project Runway,” a TV show about aspiring clothing designers (www.bloggingprojectrunway.blogspot.com).
Despite the lack of a nine-to-five job, Ms. Hewsenian is far from retired — she also recently became a director at Forward Management LLC, a San Francisco mutual fund company.
She does plan to return to work — eventually. Until then, she said in an interview, she’s enjoying the luxury of “getting out of bed sometime before noon.”
