retirement

For many the idea of retirement comes with the automatic translation that it means that you will stop working is just not acceptable.  For many, retirement from work is equivalent with no longer living.  If you have been a productive worker all of your life and someone asked you what your dream retirement might look like, you might respond “to work” because you may be one of those people for whom work is what gives meaning and purpose to life.

It isn’t fair for us to impose the same standards of retirement on everyone.  To say that to enjoy your golden years, you must take up fishing, start sleeping until noon, sit in a rocker and watch the day go by and gradually turn into a senior citizen would to many be the same as sentencing them to life in prison without parole.  So for many it’s very possible that working would be the thing that would make your retirement meaningful.

Still others must continue to work into their retirement years because they did not or could not prepare for retirement.  Whatever the situation, there are some adjustments that should be made to shift to a retirement career that you can continue to do well into your senior years. 

You can get a running start on your retirement planning if you find that a career change is appropriate later in life.  Many times we do find that the career we are in may either be changing so fast that it’s hard to keep up, it’s too physically demanding when you are older or in some other way that job has become a “young man’s game”.  If that has happened to you, you can get a jump start on finding a career that you can stick with well into your retirement years, that career can be an income generator that might never go away.

It is not at all uncommon for men in their later years to start a new career.  Perhaps you just want a career where you can use the creative side of you and one that can be a natural transition into retirement.  Perhaps you reached the maximum vesting of your retirement account with a job you held for decades so you can “retire” from that job with full benefits and funding and still start another career that you can take on into retirement and keep doing as you enjoy the fruits of retirement as well.

Many times the skills and knowledge you learned in the business world during your first career can transition you into a lucrative consulting career late in life.  One way to explore this option is to think of the venders who sold goods and services to you when you were in your previous career and contact them to see if you might now represent their services as a former satisfied customer.  If you had specialized knowledge and training in how to use their software or a technical product, that training which your former employer paid for can now transition into an exciting career as a sales representative or sale support for the very companies who once had you as a customer.

The internet can also open up worlds of money making opportunities that you can use to land work or sell something you may have made by setting up your own web site and learning how to promote yourself online. Many cottage industries have taken off and been hugely successful just getting what you do out into cyberspace.  For example, if you are talented at making beautiful artistic pottery, you can create a line of pots that is perfect for sale over the internet.  You can work with a skilled internet web developer and marketer to get your product out on the internet and before long, you might have more orders than you know what to do with all flying out through your web site which is collecting the money and filling your back account up with all the profits.

The ways you can create a new business in your retirement years are only limited by your imagination.  And once you have a good new career going that you can continue well into your retirement years, you won’t have many of the worries other retired people have.  You can enjoy the freedoms of a retirement lifestyle and made plenty of money at the same time.  And that’s a great combination.

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Being ready for retirement is not something that just happens.  Every single person you see in retirement today that is enjoying a leisurely life in their golden years are where they are because they planned for it.  The first question that may come to mind is when the right time to start planning for your retirement might be.  The answer is that if you are asking the question, it’s the right time.  You really cannot start planning too soon.  If you could start putting money back for retirement as early as right out of high school, that would be just that much more time you have to build up a really comfortable retirement nest egg that will serve you well when you need it in your golden years.

But most of us start thinking about retirement in our adult years and usually in association with some big life event such as getting married or having a baby.   So we have one word of advice if you have been thinking about beginning a retirement plan. That advice is stop thinking about it and take action.  If you make the subject a focus for you and your spouse to look at, you both will be glad you got off the dime and got moving on a plan.

Often the trouble with making a retirement plan is you don’t know where to start.   Too many people just wait for their employers to introduce a 401K plan and they just dump some money in there and count on Social Security to be there in a few decades.  Then they call it a day and call that a retirement plan.

You and I both know that your security in your golden years is too important to not take more seriously than that.  So set aside some time each week for both of you to sit down and start thinking about how to create a retirement fund and how to plan to build a retirement plan that you can grow into.  The first step always begins with you. 

If you don’t know where to start, then admit that and set about to do some reading to get ideas.  You are doing that right now by reading this article.  But get out there on the internet and find some of the great books out there on retirement planning and take some time and read them.  You will start out ignorant and end up an expert in retirement planning.

Keep plenty of notes during the discussion and learning phases so you have a road map of ideas to build into a plan for building a retirement fund.  Once you have a simple plan, its time to talk to a financial advisor. If you trust your bank, go talk to them and see what they can do for you.  Or you can seek out a friend or someone in your community who you know will be able to steer you toward how to build a retirement fund that is structured properly to protect your retirement money from taxes and be there for you when you need it when you are old and grey.

Now it is time to kick it up to the next level.  Once you have a plan and perhaps are seeing it start to take off, start learning about investments.  There are lots of places you can see your retirement funds go that will give you a nice yield that can make that fund grow more quickly do to shrewd investing.  You can divert money to real estate, the stock market, mutual funds or other well know investments.  Diversify where you put your money so no one financial reversal can whip out your retirement funding.

Above all stay on top of your retirement fund and your retirement plan. Review it together frequently to see if your retirement goals are still the same and your investments and pans for building our retirement fund line up with that plan.  By making retirement planning as big a part of your thinking as planning your family or your career, you will give it serious attention over the years.  And the result will be a strong financial plan that will give you good resources to enjoy a happy and worry free retirement life.

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In the newspaper business, when a reporter wants to find out all about a case, they always ask the big five questions which are who, what, when, where and why.  If the reporter can get these basic questions answered about any story, that is considered good research.

We can use the same approach as we begin to process the idea of retirement planning.  It would be a mistake to only look at retirement planning as strictly a financial step.  If all retirement consisted of was a change to where you get your money, that would be one level of change.  But retirement also brings with it big lifestyle changes and changes to your priorities and how you use your time.  So it’s a good idea to prepare for all of the changes retirement brings by asking the big five questions. 

Who will you be retiring with is a very important question because your mode of living is going to change in every way imaginable.  That man or woman who has been part of your life for so many decades will now become central to every move you make when retirement puts you together every day all day.  So you should think that through and decide how you want to arrange your time so both of you still have your own interests, activities and friends but you can also enjoy a new closeness that retirement affords you.

What you will be doing with your time is a huge question as you walk away from the working world.  Retirement is a great time to start enjoying those hobbies that never got enough time.  You can catch up on your reading, write the great American novel or take classes to learn to paint or do woodworking.  See retirement as a time when the sky is the limit for you to explore your creative side.

When you retire is a big factor on how much of your retirement savings you have to have ready by a certain time.  For many, dipping into the retirement savings can be postponed for years.  If you get to the point that you can collect Social Security and still make a fair amount of money part time or performing some cottage industry job, you might be able to keep your retirement savings growing even for the first five to ten years of retirement.  And that means a longer more prosperous retirement time frame for you and your spouse as well.

Where will you live once you settle into the place you want to call your retirement bungalow.  If you plan to sell the house and buy a condo or move into an assisted living center, there is a lot of preparation for both of those steps.  There isn’t time like the present to begin that retirement planning by getting the house ready to sell and by getting out and researching the best retirement living options for you to consider.

Why retire is more than just a philosophical question.  You may be retiring because you got to a certain age and it is required of you.  But to enter retirement with a good attitude, it’s good to find your own motivations for wanting to scale back your responsibilities and enjoy some leisure time as a senior citizen.  And if retirement means more time for hobbies, chances to travel or enjoy time with your spouse or greater access to those sweet grandbabies, those are great reasons to enter the life of a retired person.

But the one question we did not list that may be more than all the rest is the “how” of retirement.  How you go about moving from a life of working, selling the house and getting settled in a completely new world, perhaps with new friends and new objectives for living is a major challenge for anyone especially if you have been a productive member of the business or working world for many decades.

There are a lot of levels to the “how question”.  That is why in a lot of ways the period of time leading up to retirement and doing retirement planning can be as active as retirement itself.   But it’s good you are getting started now because by being prepared, your transition to retirement will be smooth and as painless as possible for such a big change of life.

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If you are like me, it’s easy to get fed up with constantly paying insurance premiums.  Writing a monthly check for car insurance alone will drive you crazy.   Not to mention the direct withdrawals from your paycheck for health insurance and the hit to your mortgage for home owners insurance and you have a lot of money going out the window to pay for disasters that might not even happen. 

But if those disasters do happen, you will be very glad you had insurance.  But there is one big life event that is coming that you want to do all you can to prepare for financially and that is old age and retirement.  While there is no “old age insurance”, you will find as you do your retirement planning that there are some very valuable insurance policies that are absolutely critical to a retirement life that is enjoyable, safe and prepared for.

We may or may not think of life insurance as part of retirement planning.  After all, the benefits of life insurance, at least on the surface are for those who survive you after your death which doesn’t do you a lot of good when you are living and breathing.  But you can invest in life insurance that also serves as a long term investment as well.  These policies which are sometimes called “whole life” allow the funds you put in to be invested and to build a cash value that you can cash in on when you retire. 

So you may want to carry $100,000 insurance when you are in the working world, paying a mortgage and trying to get the kids through college.  But if you can then hit retirement, cash in on the investment value of that insurance and spend your golden years with just enough insurance to cover some protection for your spouse and funeral expenses, that is a better way to organize your insurance programs.

Another layer of insurance that a lot of people are taking advantage of is Medicare supplement insurance.  Medicare is a great program that benefits a lot of people.  But Medicare can only go so far.  Those corny commercials for Medicare supplement insurance are goofy but they are on target that you need to have another safety net in the event you find yourself needing more extensive medical coverage than Medicare can provide. If you took the time to set up this kind of insurance early in your retirement planning, it will pay you big time when the need is there during your golden years.

A level of insurance that can be one of the biggest blessings if you become ill in your elderly years is in home health care insurance.  Many times illnesses that you endure due to old age are not the kind of thing you would want to get through in an expensive hospital room.  You will recover more quickly in your home but you still need someone to make sure you get your medications, take care of the little life details that you cannot tend to when you are poorly and be there if you take a turn for the worst. 

This is where the care of an in home nursing service can be so valuable.  This insurance can enable you to have care with you right in your home which will give you the care you need and take a lot of worry and work off of your family.  And since all senior citizens need medical care at some point in their retirement life, in home health care insurance is a must.

By setting up these different specialized insurance policies early enough in your working life, you can get some value into them when the time comes for you to retire.  Then you can you enter retirement with confidence knowing you have policies with reliable insurance providers to take care of the needs that you expect to come up during your golden years.

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We can all remember a time when we took the children to some event or theme park that was supposed to be “totally awesome”.  Then when the kids get there and see that Mickey Mouse is a guy in a suit and that the rides are about the same as the local Six Flags, an inevitable let down and disappointment sets in. And that is no fun for the parents on the trip home when all of those expectations did not come to pass when the kids came face to face with reality which did not line up with their dreams and hopes.

But sometimes even adults can be guilty of letting dreams and images of a golden time ahead get the best of us.  We often develop a mythology of how retirement will be when we get there and when that retired life actually starts, there are some real, down to earth adjustments that need to be made.  So if you can know some of the hidden dangers of retirement in advance, it is so much better to go into retirement with your eyes open and have realistic expectations.

There are two negative reactions to the sudden shift of lifestyle in retirement.  They are loneliness and boredom.  Even if you are going to be home all the time, there is no question that once you stop going to an office or having regular responsibilities, you can often feel a sense of loss and grief because you miss the people, the regular human contact and the fun of being out and that can result in loneliness that can get pretty chronic.

For men especially the feeling of boredom can also set in pretty fast when the challenge of the work world goes away.  In a lot of cases, men live for their jobs and when that world goes away, there is a sense of disorientation and not knowing what to do with themselves that is disconcerting for the family and for the retired man himself.  You may have been looking forward to a less stressful life only to find that it was the stress that makes you tick and without it, you feel adrift in life with no direction or goals.

Both of these problems can be addressed by not letting your retirement life be to idle, at least not at first.  You can fill your life up with volunteering, getting busy with family or by getting involved socially with other retired people.  One area of volunteering that can go a long way to replace the gratification of the work place is to work with habitat for humanity to help build homes for people who cannot afford a home any other way.  Both retired married partners can find ways to pitch in and it gets you out with people doing things that are worthwhile.

Give yourself time to get used to the idea of retirement and to the new lifestyle.  It should be a simpler lifestyle because your responsibilities are reduced and you have more time on your hands.  Be aware that if you and your spouse are suddenly around each other every day and every hour of the day, that is going to create new stresses which can also qualify as a hidden danger of retirement.  By being aware that this is not the fault of either spouse but a natural reaction.  The best response is just to get out and do things separately and create that natural space you are both used to more often.

There will be a natural down time when you first retire and treat the first month like vacation.  But don’t stay on vacation.  Let your ambition and zeal for life find new outlets.  It will be fun and exciting to see where it takes you and that is what retirement is all about.

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