How to Plan for Retirement

Source: Sal Falco, Flickr, CC 2.0

Many people reach the point when they know it’s time to retire. Of course, that evokes complicated feelings: anticipation, anxiety, excitement, fear. Here are thoughts and questions toward more excitement and less fear.

When the reality of your first day of retirement hits, you may wake up feeling disoriented, even panicked: Your plan for retirement doesn’t feel as good as you had anticipated. Perhaps the plan was too ambitious or conversely, that after a mere hour, you fear that the idea of lingering over coffee while reading doesn't have legs.

So yes, create a plan, perhaps by answering the following questions, but view the plan as cast not in stone but in Play-Doh: subject to malleability, perhaps gentle adjustment but perhaps rolling your plan’s sculpture into a ball and starting over.

Should you schedule some exciting activities to make your first month something to look forward to rather than something to panic about as you face day after day of unstructured time? For example, might you want to visit a far-flung friend you didn't have time to see when you were working? Do you want to take classes on, for example, exercise, cooking, photography, philosophy, neuroscience, or psychology?

You need a new True North. For many people, career was their True North. Now you need a new one. Is it volunteering, for example, to mentor a young person, passing on what you know to the next generation? Ensuring that your charitable donations make a real difference? Freshening your relationship with your romantic partner, family member, or friends? Making your writing, art, sport, music playing, or photography a serious activity, perhaps with a big goal: a gallery show, performing at open-mic night, a live-streamed and recorded concert, book-length memoir or great American screenplay?

Do you need time to do nothing? Whether because of fatigue or the need to clear their head, for a day or a month, some new retirees choose to do very little: sleep late, take leisurely walks literally stopping to smell the roses, drive to nowhere, or chat with friends who bring out the best in them. Perhaps that will evoke new thoughts or old ones that deserve revisiting, or increase your appreciation of the simple pleasures current or nostalgic. Sometimes, just the passage of time allows your thoughts and feelings to meld into something you want to do or feel, for example, a new attitude toward people, stuff, or life.

Do you want to treat retirement as the time to do something bigger and bolder than you felt you couldn’t do while in your job? One client described her upcoming retirement as “reaching the end of my prison sentence. Now I can do what I want.” She hopes to run mentoring groups with teenagers at her home, where "I throw stuff on the grill and see what happens.”

Regarding finances, should you reallocate your investments? Cut spending? See an accountant? Write your estate plan?

A year into your retirement, looking back on that Year One, what would you want to have done regarding family, paid and volunteer work, self-care, and your creative outlet? Care to write that and keep it on your desk?

So, whether retirement awaits now or some years hence, is there one or more things from this post that you’d like to remember?

I read this aloud on YouTube.

I thank Mark Goulston for the conversation today that informed this post.