Retired or retirement. Words one hears frequently. Bandied about by financial advisors. Used by shopkeepers with their pensioners’ days. Written about endlessly in the press. Talked about with joy or regret by one’s peers.
No doubt that as one grows older, a word or concept one cannot ignore nor deny. The reality of having to cease paid employment and join a peer group is either foisted on one by a corporate’s pension fund rules, or the reality of one’s aging. Retiring or retirement demands a different, “new” chapter where possibly three aspects dominates one’s thinking – emotional, physical, practical.
Coping initially with the emotional aspects of retirement could initially be the most difficult. The sense of irrelevance to one’s colleagues as one feels that one no longer has a contribution to make to the thinking and challenges faced by a business. The grief of saying farewell to a life of hard work and excitement of being part of a team or industry. The fear of being cut off from people. A deep sense of grieving for one’s own aging and sense of vulnerability – all aspects racing through one’s conscious and sub-conscious. But then there is the excitement and anticipation of a new route, path, chapter. And the impatience of wanting it to start now.
Fear of change – the difficulty of coping with it is so closely related to one’s home. Retirement brings with it the worry and anxiety of whether one can maintain the demands and cost of retaining the home one has lived in for years. Is it too big? Is it practical in its layout? Can one maintain it to the same high standard one has been able to do up to now? Is it safe? Must one scale down? Must one move into a retirement home? Decisions which ideally one should not be making at the time of retirement but either well before or a year or two later. A decision one should be able to make without the pressure of finance driving it.
And then the practical. Does one’s home have too many steps? Can one get to shops if one has to stop driving? And the inevitable question one has perhaps not wanted to face – does one have enough capital to live on and to maintain a semblance of one’s lifestyle pre-retirement? And the realisation that so much of what one faces at retirement is so closely tied up to the day to day financial decisions one made and makes. And the slow but inevitable realisation that planning for retirement with all its complexities start the first day of one’s working life and not on the last day.
Perhaps time to talk? Yes, to a financial advisor.
