A LITTLE PLANNING

When it comes to retirement, boomers are of two minds: those who say they’ll never retire, those who can’t wait to get out of the working game, and those somewhere in the middle in their thinking. These last ones plan to ease out of work on a gradual basis, which in my view, is probably the best way to go. With a little planning, they can taste a new life while still not letting go completely of the work they loved over decades.

It used to be people retired and did little—little planning, little exercising, little smiling. Things have evolved. It used to be you were old at sixty while now seventy is the new fifty. Baby boomers are more active than ever and, because of advances in health care and wide information dissemination, can look forward to a long retirement. In fact, it is predicted that most of today’s boomers will live well into their nineties. That’s a lot of years to do little.

I firmly believe that, like any other stage of life, retirement has to be planned to some extent. We certainly cannot plan every minute of every day, but there should be a guiding desire toward a goal. We are all different so goals will be different for everyone. A friend, who is about to retire, told me recently that he has not planned anything beyond playing golf as much as he can. That’s certainly a nice enjoyable goal, but there has to be more to life in retirement.

Just as we chose careers that appealed to us, that fit our personalities, our choice of activities in retirement should be based on what moves us, makes us feel good, not what friends or family feel we should be doing. I know a man who turned to photography in retirement and is having a grand old time. He was a chef all his life so his children thought he would spend his retirement preparing meals for them. They had trouble accepting that he wanted out of the kitchen to embrace a new passion. He’s the perfect example of a fulfilled retiree. Good for him, I say. A retiree’s mantra should be change for the new, the fun, the fulfilling.