Your retirement can be anything you want it to be. It is up to you whether you want to your retirement to be ordinary or extraordinary. For many people, retirement is simply ‘not working’ – in both senses of that term. Retirement should be joyful, full of meaning and purpose. However, an extraordinary retirement doesn’t happen by itself. It is designed.
Designing your extraordinary retirement begins with asking yourself what retirement means for you.
What is it you want more of ? Fun, joy, travel, time with family and friends, hobbies that you’ve never had time for?
What is it you want less of? Worry, stress, commuting, fatigue?
To have an extraordinary retirement, you need a sense of purpose; a reason to get out of bed in the morning. Often this involves helping others – your family, friends, a group you belong to, or the wider community – as a mentor, volunteer, leader, or teacher.
Whatever you do, it needs to bring you joy. Creating joy means doing more things that bring you joy and avoiding or eliminating things that detract from joy. Some years ago, Japanese woman Marie Kondo advocated a process for decluttering your home and your wardrobe using the ‘KonMari method’. This method encourages decluttering by holding objects and deciding whether to keep them or discard them based on whether or not they spark joy. It’s no different with deciding what to keep in or out of your retirement.
Joy can, and should, come from many different things. Just like your financial investments, your investment in joy needs to be diversified. It needs to come from many different sources. Ideally, they should cover all the different aspects of your life:
- Your physical fitness – walking, swimming, golf, going to the gym etc
- Your social life – coffee groups, book clubs, gardening clubs etc
- Your mental stimulation – learning a new language or skill, reading, going to the theatre etc
- Your creativity – painting, photography, hand crafts etc
- Your spirituality – meditation, connecting with nature, mindfulness, religion etc
- Your connection with others – family, friends, the wider community
The foundation for an extraordinary retirement has two cornerstones – your financial security and your physical health. These form the baseline of your happiness in retirement. Without financial security your focus becomes financial survival and financial stress detracts from your ability to enjoy life. Without good physical health, your ability to enjoy your retirement is limited to the extent of your physical capabilities and life is especially hard if you have a chronic illness with debilitating symptoms such as pain.
Constructing an extraordinary retirement starts with addressing these two cornerstones. Financial security comes not from having vast wealth, but from having a plan for the wealth you have and adjusting your goals to fit your budget. Finding joy does not require a fortune.
Physical health requires a long term commitment to being active, maintaining healthy eating habits and monitoring your health status through regular medical checks. Everybody ages at a different rate and the challenge is for your biological age to be the same as or less than your chronological age. While it is not possible to reverse ageing, it is certainly possible to slow the ageing process through exercise, diet and mental stimulation.
Being retired doesn’t mean you stop developing as a person. People who enjoy an extraordinary retirement are those who don’t succumb to society’s view that retirees are ‘too old’ to try new things or to keep doing the things they have always loved doing. Age should not be a barrier to personal development or to enjoyment of life. Retiring from work does not mean you have to retire from life.
