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Retirement

Planning to retire is exciting, bittersweet and a little bit dangerous, all at the same time.

Freedom from the daily grind, the hassled commute, the petty complaints of those you work with are all key factors anticipated. Freedom to sleep as long as you want and do what you want calls to us after years of running to someone else's timetable.

But there are downsides to retiring and here is where our cranky expert comes in.

Often your work has ceased to be fulfilling, but remains a central anchor to your daily life. The ritual of a regular paycheck is not easy to let go of when you have an unknown number of years ahead to live off your assets. Sometimes, the social contact with your work colleagues is all the contact you manage if you have poor outside networks. And crucially, sometimes, our job is what we use to define who we are.

Research now indicates that unless you have a pretty good plan for your retirement, you can become depressed and isolated very quickly.

Spend a few minutes imagining your daily life as a retiree. What will you do? Who will you talk to? Will you travel? Where will you live? What will get you out of bed every morning?

After you imagine the first few mornings of blissful laziness, it will pale quickly when you think it could go on for many more years. It needs a plan.

Below is a list of possibilities I am working on. While you read it, think about some of the possibilities you might consider and start writing them down.

1) Ensure retirement funds are sufficient and secure. Diversify investments into a range of sectors so funds are not exposed entirely to anything like the GFC. As far as possible be debt free.

2) Decide where to live. It will need to be small and efficient because energy and water costs are going to skyrocket in the coming decades. Garden space would be helpful to grow veggies, berries and fruit. Maybe chickens too.

3) Same with transport as above. Small and efficient.

4) Improve social networks now. While raising the kids, I let that slip, but now I need to re-establish friendship networks that are not necessarily driven by where I live or work. I'm not the only one planning to leave the big smoke. This is a particularly difficult thing to do and will need to be worked at.

6) Plan to volunteer at least 1-2 days a week. Drive a bus, help school kids to read, visit patients in a hospital, garden for the elderly, weed the parks, plant trees, there's lots that needs doing. This will likely turn into a portfolio of deeds rather than the same things week in and week out.

7) Continue to work on my website to build a community of women that help and be helped.

8) Travel regularly. Some trips will be to visit friends, some will be to do environmental conservation work around the world. I would like to register as a volunteer for a range of agencies that work overseas without putting myself in harms way, so no war zones for me. But I am happy to put my back into helping to build schools or teach english or plant gardens.

9) Beyond this, I have joined a choir, I am doing weekend conservation work and I am hoping to go back to school part time. All toe dipping exercises on my longer term plans.

10) Still of interest and not formally in the plan, studying a language and learning how to play an instrument, getting my motorcycle licence and building an eco-friendly house.

All of this, of course, assumes good health, stable funds, kids established independantly and no catastrophies, like redundancy. It's all we can do.

As John Lennon so famously said, life is what happens when you're busy making plans.

What will your plans be?

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