1 Why Trust this Guide?
Ben and his wife had been talking about retirement for a long time. Yet that was the trouble: they’d only been talking about retirement, not truly doing anything to plan or prepare for it. Ben only realized that he and his wife were not prepared for retirement, when they finally decided that it was time. Only then did Ben and his wife take a good look at their expenses, savings, health insurance, housing, and things that they’d like to do in retirement. But by then, right on the cusp of retiring, preparing for retirement almost seemed too late. Ben and his wife agreed that it would be funny if it weren’t so sad, but Ben and his wife had a lot of work to do to retire. Ben decided that if they were going to manage their retirement properly, even at this late date, then he was going to need a sound guide.
Retirement
Retirement is a big issue for many Americans. Retirement has about it the oddest mix of attraction and fear. On the one hand, retirement beckons as a relative life of relaxation and ease, freed of the burden of employment or other income-producing work. Yet on the other hand, retirement looms with the concern of living within one’s means, when not enjoying an income from work. And retirement reminds one of declining strength, worsening health, lost friends, and shortening years. Nothing about life is especially easy. Retirement is no different. Planning for retirement, though, can make a big difference, just as planning and preparation make big differences in other aspects of life. Why not, then, accept a sound guide? Get all the seasoned and strategic advice that you can about retirement, especially as it grows near. And then make a good go of it. Make your retirement the crowning years of a well-lived life.
Planning
Planning for retirement is indeed a big key to making retirement a success. Not everyone gets to plan for retirement. A sudden and unexpected job termination, or an equally sudden and unexpected disability of the working spouse or a dependent spouse needing the worker’s full-time care, can bring about an unplanned retirement. In other cases, some of us just wake up one morning, suddenly ready to call it a career. You’ve got a lot of work to do in a relatively small period, if you haven’t had a chance to plan for retirement. The same is true, though, if you had the chance to plan for retirement but neglected to take it. Some of us are planners, while others of us are not. If you’re not a planner, then you’ll have to prepare for retirement right when it comes. Yet you’ll still need to know what to do. And that’s again the role of this guide, to give you clear advice on what to do right now, when retirement is upon you.
Adjustments
Either way, with or without the time to plan and prepare for retirement, a good retirement requires making some adjustments. You could simply quit working, not change anything else, and muddle your way into and through retirement. But stopping work generally brings too many changes. You can’t pretend as if you’ve nothing else to do, beyond stopping work, to make a good go of your retirement. Stopping work generally interrupts or alters your income, health insurance, other work benefits, duties, challenges, opportunities, daily routine, friendships, and community. A good retirement often requires quite a few adjustments and sometimes big adjustments, not just in your new household budget without earned income and with additional health insurance expenses, but also in your housing, transportation, activities, friendships, and community. Your retirement can benefit from making those adjustments wisely, efficiently, and timely. Timely sometimes means well in advance of retirement or at least the moment retirement occurs but may at other times mean in your retirement’s course and progress. To make the right adjustments in the right manner and with the right timing can take the insight of a sound guide. Good that you’re reading this guide. Make the most of it, and it should serve you well.
Comprehension
Comprehending what retirement is or should be, and thus how to make the best of it, can be at least as big of a thing as the adjustments you may need to make. If you don’t have the right frame of mind about retirement, you may not learn to enjoy what it is. If you’re not thinking about retirement correctly, retirement may become something that you don’t appreciate. Retirement can be a bit like getting married, where you don’t truly know what you’ve gotten into until after the wedding, but you’re generally much better off to do what you can to find out in advance. Or retirement can be like buying a great-looking used car, where you’re generally much better off having taken it for a test drive and maybe also having had a mechanic check it out. Or retirement can be like going to your high school class’s fiftieth reunion, where you don’t know whether your old friends or only your old antagonists are going to show up. When you know what’s coming, you can set your expectations straight, where expectations have a lot to do with how much you enjoy the event that follows. Get a good look at retirement from this guide, to keep your expectations straight.
Complications
Retirement can not only be a good bit different than one expected but also a good bit more complicated than one would expect. You’d think that retirement would greatly simplify life. After all, you’ve given up working, which, when you’re working, can seem like ninety percent of life’s complications. One might think that retirement would be bliss, without the demands and complications of work. Yet somehow, retirement life can seem nearly as complicated as work life. And the complications can be especially common and even severe when you haven’t planned and prepared well for retirement. Failing to prepare with respect to your finances, housing, transportation, health, fitness, nutrition, health insurance, activities, family, friendships, and in other ways can quickly complicate things, even greater than they were when you were still hard at work. Don’t make things more complicated in retirement than they need to be. Follow this guide, and you should be able to avoid many relatively common retirement mistakes and messes.
Trajectory
One way to uncomplicate things in retirement is to get a sense of retirement’s typical trajectory. Every retirement is unique because every individual is unique and every life is unique. But still, retirements tend to follow a similar arc or course. The early part of retirement generally focuses on the transition out of work life and into retirement life. That transition typically involves changes in daily activities and patterns, without the structure and time demands of regular work. The transition also typically involves changes in spending patterns to manage retirement finances, which may include downsizing housing. Both of those changes, in activities and expenditures, can be disruptive, even stressful, so expect a little bumpiness. Early into retirement, one generally has more vigor and fewer health issues and limitations. And so the early part of retirement may involve more adventure travel and leisure activity, long planned and delayed when still busy with work. But too soon, retirement can bring declining vigor and increasing health issues, naturally turning the focus from adventure to maintenance. The latter stage of retirement brings the transition from independence to dependence, in preparation for departure into the great beyond. Let this guide help you see and plan for the full trajectory of retirement, to manage retirement as fruitfully as you can.
Experience
Experience is a great teacher, no less for retirement than for other things. I’ve written this guide from experience. I am retired or at least semi-retired, having left my full-time career as a lawyer, law professor, and campus dean to work from home as a web-content writer for law firms and as a publisher. My experience, though, isn’t just having gone through the process of retiring from full-time employment, transitioning into life at home, beginning Medicare and supplemental health insurance, commencing Social Security, and spending more time caring for my own family including my wife, daughter, and grandson. In addition to those usual retirement experiences, I also have the perspective of my law practice, including estate planning, guardianships, conservatorships, powers of attorney, probate, decedent’s estates, and other legal aspects of retirement. With a banker, financial advisor, business analyst, psychologist, and other professionals, I have also researched, written, and published articles and books on jobs, careers, personal and business finances, money management, retirement planning, and other subjects germane to retirement. You should find my guidance to be sound, informative, and reliable.
Roadmap
The guide begins by addressing some basic questions including what retirement is, why to retire, when to retire, and how to plan and prepare for retirement. Subsequent chapters then address the major retirement issues, from finances and budgets to housing, transportation, health, insurance, community, and activities including travel. The latter part of the guide addresses disability, assistance, nursing homes, family, legacy, and bereavement. The guide thus has a logical start-to-finish order to it so that you get a complete perspective on retirement, not just how to plan and prepare for it but also how to navigate it and how to end retirement with faith, assurance, and a secure legacy. Each chapter begins with a brief story illustrating the chapter’s subject. Each paragraph of each chapter has its own heading in case you want to scan and skip around. Each chapter concludes with reflection questions to urge you to think more deeply about what you’ve just read. And each chapter concludes with bullet-point summaries of the chapter’s main points.
Use
You may, of course, benefit from reading the whole guide front to back, cover to cover. Doing so should address every major question you might have about retirement along with many smaller issues. But don’t waste time on subjects that you’ve already addressed. Use the table of contents, the chapter titles showing the question that each chapter addresses, and the paragraph headings, to navigate to the retirement issues most pressing for you. You can also skim the guide, focusing on the stories at each chapter’s start and the reflection questions and bullet-point summaries at each chapter’s end, to see what other subjects you might want to explore. If you have additional questions about legacy issues, including wills, trusts, heirs, foundations, guardianships, conservatorships, and powers of attorney, read the guide Help with Your Legacy. If you have additional questions about end-of-life issues, read the guide Help with Your Demise. Review other guides on money, faith, your psyche or soul, and other big life issues at help-with-your.com.
Obstacles
Retirement can have some serious obstacles to it. Don’t underestimate those obstacles when planning, preparing for, and navigating retirement. When you start school, you can drop and add courses, and even change majors and colleges or universities. You can even fail a course or two, withdraw from school, and go back again later. Likewise, when you start a job or career, you can often recover from your mistakes, even some pretty big mistakes. You can change jobs and even switch careers. The same thing is true with your finances; you can suffer some pretty big reversals early on and still make a good recovery. When you’re younger, even your health is something that you can generally address and improve. Family relationships, too, you can generally get back on track when things go a little off the rails. But retirement isn’t quite like that. In retirement, you don’t have as much time and energy for a do over. In retirement, financial problems, issues with your housing, health, and family, and other issues tend to get off track more quickly and farther, making it much harder to recover. Know that in retirement, your risks of erring in your navigation can be greater than when erring earlier in life. Things can get serious quickly in retirement. Heed a sound guide.
Team
A good way to get the help you need for the best possible retirement is to assemble a retirement team. We generally succeed at things in life when we have a strong, skilled, and dedicated team around us. Retirement is no different. Consider this guide to be like a team member, perhaps a team captain giving you the overview of retirement. If you haven’t already done so, make connections with a family physician with a geriatrics practice and with a nutritionist, fitness coach, and social worker who help elderly clients. Add a financial advisor, estate-planning lawyer, real estate agent, independent insurance agent, psychologist or counselor, pastor, retirement home director, and funeral director to your retirement team. You don’t necessarily need to immediately retain them for any specific service. Just locate and contact them to assure yourself that they will be available to you when you need them. Let them know that’s your purpose, and listen to whether they have any recommendations for you now. Having a strong retirement team in place can both give you peace of mind and instant access to professional service when you need it.
Reflection
On a scale from one to ten, how prepared are you for retirement? What are your biggest retirement concerns? What, if anything, have you already done to address those biggest concerns? Do you expect to make big adjustments once you retire? Which adjustments do you sense may be most difficult? Do you believe that early planning and wise preparation can help you navigate the transition into retirement? Do you have a sense of the natural trajectory to retirement? Can you see how you’ll continue to have adjustments to make throughout retirement, for which you could continue to plan and prepare? What obstacles do you believe that you’re sure to face in retirement? Do you believe that preparing for those biggest obstacles can make them easier to navigate? Who has already helped you think about and plan for retirement? Who else can you put on your retirement team?
Key Points
Retirement can be a wonderful time of life with help navigating it.
Planning for retirement can help a lot, with avoiding transition stress.
Retirement can take significant adjustments on several big fronts.
Simply comprehending retirement’s nature and demands can help.
Retirement can be surprisingly complicated, nearly so as work life.
Knowing retirement’s common trajectory or arc can also help.
Trust this guide from the author’s professional experience.
Follow the guide’s comprehensive, start-to-finish order for retirement.
Use the chapter titles and headings to navigate to what you need.
Beware of the considerable obstacles that retirement can raise.
Put together a retirement team to help you navigate your big issues.