Designing Your Retirement

Retirement is going to change your life.  And it is going to change your life in more ways than just not going to work every day. It gives you freedom; it gives you choice and it gives you time. It also gives you the responsibility of keeping yourself happy, healthy, wealthy and wise.

 For some people retirement will be just an increase of what they already do when they are not at work. They will spend time on the hobbies they have always done, visit with the people they already socialize with, and perhaps take a vacation or two. No real change, just more time and more freedom.  In many ways they are very lucky people since the transition to retirement should be an easy slide into more of what they already have.  However, if they don’t have enough hobbies or variety of activities they may become bored of the routine.

I had a great fear of being bored in my retirement so I did some serious searching on the internet for advice on planning for this big change. Like many people I list travel as one of the things I will do for my retirement but my choice to retire before my husband means that travel isn’t the biggest part of my plan right now.  Also, I knew that hobbies alone would not be enough.

One of the most useful articles I read about planning for retirement is at the link below this page. 

I actually completed the “wheel of life” and found that it really did help me build a vision of how I would create a full and balanced life with all my new freedom, choice and time.  I really love activities like that and creating a pie with slices of life, all neat and pretty was fun. It is quicker and neater than a vision board.  It has also given me something to consider if I need to.  I updated it and made some tweaks after a rather unsettling conversation with someone who is finding he has too many hours to fill with his retirement--he's been retired for more than a year.  I found it useful to consider how I build up a "slice" and to consider how these slices would shift in importance over the next few months.  

 Here are the instructions and below that is a link to the full article.  

 Envision your new world. One tool I find helpful in transitions is “the wheel of life.” This wheel looks like a pie with eight slices representing different elements of life: Fun, Health, Money, Friends, Career, Spouse, Physical Environment (home), and Personal Growth. A useful exercise is to go through each category and write out your vision for each. Where are you now in this area, and where might you like to take these in your transition? If you have a spouse or partner, involve them in the process. Reinventions are a team sport, after all.

How To Design A Retirement That Excites You
https://hbr.org/2015/11/design-a-retirement-that-excites-you