How to Make Your Money Last: The Indispensable Retirement Guide by Jane Bryant Quinn

1

The Joy and Challenge of Life After Work

Now that you can do whatever you want, what do you want to do?
Retirement challenges us like nothing else. We have to reinvent our lives. One
day we’re part of the vast American workforce—living by the clock, attacking
new projects, and focusing our minds and skills. The next day we can sleep until
noon if it pleases us. Then we bound out of bed, free at last, ready for coffee and
lunch and… what?
Successful retirement—whenever it occurs—turns out to be work of another
kind. The future now is almost as blank a slate as it was when you were 18 and
wondering what was going to happen to you. Fifty years later, you’re fortified
with knowledge and experience but with no place to take it. You might have a
partner in life, children, grandchildren, status in your community, and a dog
that loves you. Still, you have seven days a week and 52 weeks a year to fill. No
sane human being can watch that much television or play that much golf.
Maybe you’ll be able to stay at work well past normal retirement age, perhaps
with shortened hours. But the last day of work can’t be held off forever. You
need an action plan to transition into this new phase of life.
You also need a financial plan to make the most of the income and savings
that you have available. That’s what most of this book is about. “Money can’t
buy happiness,” they say, but it sure can buy food, shelter, heat, phone service,
streaming movies on all our new devices, and gas for the car. A little extra buys
plane tickets, ball games, concerts, and long-term peace of mind. It’s hard to be
happy if you’re always worried about the bills. Learning how to stretch your
available income and rightsize your life are the first steps toward retiring well.
Even if retirement seems far away, steps you take now—to save and invest—can
greatly improve your standard of living when your paycheck eventually stops.
But before I talk money, I’d like to talk about the nonfinancial challenges of
life after full-time work. They’re huge and, for most people, unexpected. We
fling ourselves into leisure as if a grand vacation lay ahead. But permanent
vacations can get pretty boring. When we were working, we had a sense of
accomplishment and a place in the world, even if—at the end—we couldn’t wait
to quit. Now, having shut that door, we need another place. What are we retiring
to?
Eventually, when you look back on your transition from work to retirement,
you’ll think of it as perhaps the most creative period of your life. Most of us still
need an active sense of social worth. But instead of getting it from a workplace,
ready-made, we have to make it ourselves. The challenge is to discover new
interests, new places, and new friends. Your weeks should fill up again with
projects, meetings, entertainments, family visits, and events—activities you
choose yourself, to gladden your days and give purpose to your life. You’ll
probably take on these projects at a leisurely pace. You won’t want to be busy
every minute. But neither will you want to look at a daily calendar that’s blank.
It takes time to move from the worker role to the role of engaged individual
citizen. How long the transition takes will depend on your personal initiative
and will. The faster you can bury the old “workplace you” and rise to a new
“liberated you,” the more content you’re going to be.
Not everyone moves into retirement willingly. You might lose your job and
spend some unhappy weeks or months rehashing that stressful time. Your health
(or your spouse’s health) might be dicey, which, for now, completely occupies
your mind. The departure from work might have been so sudden that you had
no time to prepare emotionally.
Widows, widowers, and the divorced face similar problems. They’ve been
forcibly “retired” from married life and now face their own blank slates.

How to Make Your Money Last: The Indispensable Retirement Guide by Jane Bryant Quinn