Plan Your Retirement Carefully
It’s a major mistake most people make. They save for college, plan their careers and all the moves to get ahead and they even plan their vacations. But most people don’t plan their retirement. Yes, they plan for financial concerns like making sure they won’t run out of money, but they don’t plan for how they’ll spend their time. My advice to everyone is to plan your retirement carefully. You’ll be coming to the end of decades of full days and being directed by your employer as how you will spend your day. My working days were filled with meetings, conference calls and presentations and every one of those undertakings required some planning as well. There were annual budgets and project plans. Annual reviews with employees and your own career planning as well. Then, suddenly, all of those things disappear. Sadly, for many people it’s thrust upon them by Corporate America as part of a periodic cutback or layoff. Even for those who announced a retirement date and knew when their last day of work would be, the change in the daily pace of activity can be quite jarring.
Plan your retirement carefully.
It can make all the difference!
I am a planner by nature, and it was one of the things I was responsible for during my working career. I have a tendency to think ahead to try to understand the consequences the future will bring and being prepared for it. I knew that retirement would require a complete mindset change but it was something I was looking forward to and something I had dreamed about during those endless and sometimes painful meetings. I was more like a prisoner being released than an employee facing his retirement day. But I was ready, and I hope you are too. Plan your retirement carefully and you will reap the benefits. Make sure you find an appropriate way to celebrate because it’s a great way to ease into the change in lifestyle.
My last day of work was the week before Christmas, and I took the rest of the year off with vacation time and made my last official day of employment the last day of the year. The holiday festivities occupied all of my time and our first winter getaway was scheduled for the second week in January, which gave us a week to de-Christmas the house and get ready for our twelve-week escape from the cold. My wife and I looked like a couple of college students heading off for a new semester because we had the car packed to capacity. We had never been away for longer than two weeks so we brought everything you can imagine with us. We learned during this trip that we had been way too excessive in what we brought and have trimmed down significantly since then. It’s all a learning process and a lot of fun. On the way down to warmer climates we experienced a blizzard in Charleston which brought the city to a halt and made our planned activities something we would have to do on a future trip. You can plan your retirement carefully, but you can’t anticipate everything.
Our first winter getaway took us up and down Florida and then up through to New Orleans where we spent a wonderful week experiencing great food and music. Then it was on through to the Gulf Coast of Florida and then up along the Mississippi with a stop in Springfield, the Land of Lincoln. We made it home on time, on budget and immediately started planning for next year. If you plan your retirement carefully, the process of planning never stops, and each trip is enhanced by two components: the planning of each detail and then the actual trip itself. Believe me, it doubles the enjoyment.
When we came home from our trip, we knew how we would be spending our days. My wife would take up woodworking, which was something she had dabbled with over the years. It is a little bit different to stop buying jewelry for your wife for her birthday or Christmas and switch over to woodworking tools. A power saw isn’t the most romantic Valentine’s Day present, but she liked it. We also had a house to plan and build. We were going to move from our home on Long Island to the Hudson Valley in upstate New York. It has turned out to be a wonderful change of pace and a true adventure with all the details that go into building a house that is custom designed and contracted. Building your dream home is one of the most satisfying things you can do and, if you plan your retirement carefully, you can make it happen.
What did I end up doing? I wrote a short novel which I decided not to publish but got so much pleasure out of writing I looked for other avenues to practice my craft. Sadly, the short story market has kind of dried up and, although I have a couple of plot ideas for another novel, I have, in the meantime, discovered the wonders of creating a website which you’re reading right now. It allows me the freedom to write about the things that give me great pleasure and share them in a way that I hope inspires people to make the most of this wonderful time of life that we call retirement. If you do it correctly, it’s not really retiring. If you plan your retirement carefully, you can take advantage of all of this free time that you’ve been given to do the things you really wanted to be doing while you were working. It’s an amazing feeling to enjoy your morning coffee and not dread going to work. Because there is no work! I only do the things I want to do and, sometimes, I don’t even do those things. There was a whole year when I barely touched this website because of all the activities that came with building the house and then moving. And we never stopped traveling so we were gone all winter and still managed to see the world on trips and cruises that aligned with the travel destinations we both wanted to see.
We are very fortunate. Our retirement has been better than we ever imagined. It’s been a wonderful story that I have tried to give a glimpse of with this website. But it can be your story as well if you plan your retirement carefully. You’ll be surprised at how much fun you can have in the process. This is a wonderful world that we live in. You’ve got to go out and experience it and make it happen. It’s time to Enjoy Retired Life!
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