How To Ease Your Transition into Retirement
Finally, your long-awaited retirement is approaching. But you feel stressed. Why is that? Perhaps you fear that no matter how much you’ve been looking forward to retiring, the feeling of being on “permanent vacation” will start to wear off. Or perhaps you fear that you will have more time but less money to spend.
Whether you’re already retired and are struggling with the life change or are planning to make the transition soon, this article provides tips on easing your transition into this new phase of life, and what you can do during retirement to find meaning and purpose outside of work.
Common Challenges in Retirement
Here are some of the challenges you might face as you prepare for this new chapter or may already be experiencing during retirement:
- Feeling a loss of identity based on the assumption of “you are what you do for work”
- Feeling a loss of usefulness, importance, or self-confidence
- Feeling bored and unsure of what to do with the extra time
- Feeling you have more time but less money to spend
The following tips can help with these challenges.
3 Tips to Ease Your Transition into Retirement
Feeling a loss of identity
After spending many years in a particular profession, some people may feel that their identity is tied to what they do, or did, for work. However, this is not entirely true. For instance, you may be a Vice President of Sales, but you may also be a marathon runner, a community volunteer, a gardener and so on.
These activities – your interests – also define who you are and can become the focus of your retirement. Rediscovering old interests and refocusing on new interests is one way to cope with the loss of a sense of self and to establish a new sense of identity.
Feeling a loss of usefulness
Achievement can be felt both at work and outside of work. Continuing to find fulfillment is important in life. Setting new goals can bring about a satisfaction akin to “job” satisfaction.
For instance, deciding to learn how to oil paint or to learn a new language can become a new life goal. Such goals also enable you to make new social connections with people who share similar interests. Remember, just because you’ve retired doesn’t mean that you have lost value – the value from your experiences honed over many years is still within you and can be used to succeed in your new goals.
Feeling bored
For those who are used to maintaining a busy schedule, planning both short- and long-term can help you fight off boredom. The solution is to keep yourself busy.
For instance, long-term planning means focusing on an objective that will require you to spend time investigating and figuring out the details of how to achieve the objective – an example could be a DIY project or organizing a charity event. Short-term planning, on the other hand, means focusing on having a list of “to-dos” to complete – which could be household chores, people you’d like to visit or places you’d like to go.
Don’t Wait to Begin Preparing
Retirement can be one of the best times of your life; your mindset and how you prepare for it can make all the difference to the level of enjoyment you feel in your golden years. Don’t wait to begin preparing, even if it seems far away. More importantly, don’t wait to prepare from a financial perspective either.
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Established in 1985, Bloom Investment Counsel, Inc. specializes in providing and actively managing personalized Canadian and U.S. dividend-paying portfolios for wealthy individuals and families, family offices, foundations, corporations, institutions and trusts. We help clients generate an independent stream of income (if desired) while protecting, preserving, and building long-term wealth through our personalized dividend-paying portfolio management service.
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This content is provided for general informational purposes only and does not constitute financial, investment, tax, legal or accounting advice nor does it constitute an offer or solicitation to buy or sell any securities referred to. Individual circumstances and current events are critical to sound investment planning; anyone wishing to act on this content should consult with his or her financial partner or advisor.