One weekend a month for the past several months, the diocesan Office for Marriage and Family Life in conjunction with the Retirement Peace Project have been offering Retirement Peace University sessions for individuals or couples over age 50. There is still time to sign up for the next weekend session, which is scheduled to run March 19-20 at the Catholic Pastoral Center, 1615 W. Washington St., in Springfield.

The Retirement Peace University is a 10-hour interactive workshop that covers 40 topics that are important to those who are planning to retire within the next 10 to 20 years. It covers debt freedom, personal health and Medicare, Social Security maximization, estate planning, long-term care and much more. Attendees receive live instruction, watch informational videos and receive a 100-page take-home workbook.

Mark Pettyjohn, CEO and founder/developer of the retirement program, is the principle teacher for the weekend classes, which typically run from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Saturday and from 1 to 4 p.m. on Sunday. His goal, he says, is to teach mature Americans how to make educated and informed decisions about their retirement — and no personal financial information is disclosed during the seminar.

"Initially, we offered our sessions to people from Springfield parishes, such as Blessed Sacrament and Little Flower," said Pettyjohn of the first several weekend sessions that have been offered at the Catholic Pastoral Center in Springfield. "Now we're ready to reach out and expand and open it to people from other parishes and areas. We plan to do eight or nine more classes that will take us to other parts of the diocese."

Blessed Sacrament parishioners Kevin and Sharon Schraeder attended a recent Retirement Peace University workshop. "We hesitated to give up our valuable weekend time for a retirement workshop, but are so glad we did as the time was very valuable in another way," said Sharon Schraeder. "The Retirement Peace University covered a wide variety of retirement issues. The talk about compound interest made me wish we had taken this course many years ago. The workshop that we completed afterwards helped us to get a better picture of our financial future."

"Retirement University brought to our attention the many subjects that need to be considered before taking the step into retirement," Kevin Schraeder said. "Not just pensions and Social Security revenues, but items including living wills, daily expenses and long-term care."

Pettyjohn said he has been teaching classes on retirement since 1992. "Over the years, we have had 25,000 families come through and we've helped people save over $4 billion in added dollars for retirement."

Future retirees tend to be anxious about retirement but seem to be resistant to learning more, Pettyjohn said. "Older people, by this I mean people over age 50, need to learn about this," he said. "It really is life-transforming. When you work 40 to 50 years to be able to retire, why would you want to make mistakes that could cost you hundreds of thousands of dollars?"

The event normally costs $199, however a limited number of scholarships for the diocesan event have been made available, thanks to previous enthusiastic attendees who have contributed to "pay it forward" so that others could benefit from the program.

For more information on the next Retirement Peace University — or another future session — contact or (217) 498-7700.