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Retire: to put on new treads Retirement planning involves the saving phase, the spending phase, and perhaps just as important, the what-are-you-going-to-do phase. The July 1996 AAII Journal covered this part of retirement planning in an article titled "Myths and Misconceptions About Life in Retirement". Between working and commuting, your job is occupying at least 9 hours of each day and during retirement you need to be able to fill those hours. Maybe you would not mind staying at home all day long every day, but that is not my choice because you would find me dancing on the ceiling quite quickly. The transition between your working days and your retirement days can be as easy or as difficult as you would like. My own feeling is that you need to have at least one thing lined up for after you leave the work force. In my own case, the transition period lasted about a month and during this time, I was filling in more of the day's time. A friend of mine shares the opinion that without structure, the days would turn into mighty long days. This thought is reiterated by my daughter and a former teacher who both said that a person needs to keep planning and looking forward to something; without this stimulation the brain, and eventually body, go into a stale mode. You should be able to look upon retirement as a time of opportunity rather than a time of boredom; seems that some folks get so bored that they return to a job just to have something to do. Sometimes a person explores so many hobbies and interests before retirement that when the day arrives, there are no more interests to pursue. And taking care of all those odds & ends around the house gets tiresome real quick. Lifelong learning and volunteering in the community have been in my vocabulary for the last 20 years. All my working years were in the day shift and therefore all the classes that I took were in the evening. Quite a few classes were and are not offered at night at our local community college and therefore were beyond my reach. If you never liked studying for exams then maybe college-level classes are not for you. But if you take these classes and study and take tests your mind cannot help but to be active. Volunteer opportunities abound for people of all ages, and retirement can open a door to many more possibilities than you have during your working years. You can pick and choose what you want to do and when you want to do it. Nice hours!! |