7 factors of a smooth retirement transition

Transcript

You may remember that a while back, I did a post called the Retirement Readiness Assessment, where I went through five attributes that typically play into whether or not you'll have a smooth retirement transition. And I had people score themselves on those five attributes from one to five. And then your final score helped determine whether or not you had a little work to do to prepare for a smoother retirement transition. I got a lot of responses to that. And some people would say, like, actually, I did great on these five, but you might want to consider this other thing. And so I ended up with two pretty common other things that came up in the comments. So I've added those. And today I'm not going to do an assessment, but I'll list the seven sort of common attributes that seem to play into whether or not someone has a smooth retirement transition. So number one is, how much time did the person have to prepare for retirement? It seems like people that were sort of surprised by retirement, or who retired abruptly, or who retired for health reasons, or maybe they were part of a reorg, but people who didn't have time to sort of mentally and emotionally prepare for retirement, generally struggle with the transition. You know, typically they come out fine, but, you know, it's six months to 18 months of, you know, sort of sorting things out that doesn't seem to exist quite as much for those who had plenty of warning. And it looks like two to three years of not necessarily planning, but awareness of your retirement date seems to be very helpful. Number two is, how much do you like your current job? I found that a lot of commenters said, I hated my job. So when I hit retirement, it was pure bliss. Me personally, I struggled with the retirement transition quite a bit, and I loved my job. I had all the normal stuff to deal with in the adjustment. Plus I was missing my job. So how much you like your job seems to play into it quite a bit. Hobbies are a big part of it. So number three is, how many hobbies have I actively participated in the last 12 months? Somebody told me that one of the things they discovered is they had hobbies that they loved, but they didn't like it. They had hobbies that they loved doing when they were working, but then they completely lost interest in it when they retired. And I experienced that too. And I'll talk about that in another post because it's a little lengthy. Number four is close personal friendships versus work friendships. So most people who retire realize that their work friendships were just that. When they move out of the workplace, the friendships go with it. There's, uh, there's no more work friendships. They were, uh, they were just, they were just bonded by the common, you know, work that they were doing together. So if a person doesn't have very many close personal friendships that typically will, will lead to some struggling in the retirement transition. I don't have a lot of personal friendships. Like I have a couple, um, but I'm very close to my younger brother and we talk pretty much every day. And, uh, he was kind of my bridge, um, through the retirement process, because, because he was just always there as a sounding board to just kind of talk this stuff through. And I think you really need that. Number five is how well do you unplug during vacations? If you struggle to unplug when you go on vacation, you're probably going to struggle with unplug when you retire. And you can imagine the scale is much higher. So it's something to consider. Number six is do I currently have a regular exercise regimen? For me, I didn't. You know, I stayed active, but I didn't have anything in place that ensured that I kept moving. So I had to develop an exercise regimen after I retired. And it was kind of problematic because it was one more sort of structure slash process thing that I needed to change. And I really didn't need to be adding to that list right after I retired. So if I could do it over again, I would have established a, uh, consistent exercise regimen, a year before I retired. And number seven is how much free time do you have before you retire? So it looks like people who have a significant amount of daily free time do a little better in their retirement transition because they're already accustomed to sort of being alone with their thoughts. People that are kind of kept hopping all day and they just kind of like slide into bed sideways and then wake up in the morning, um, have a little harder time with retirement because, uh, all of those distractions go away or most of them. And, uh, they have to learn to adjust to being alone with their thoughts and, uh, not a bad thing. Just it's another transition. And the idea is to sort of minimize all of these different structural emotional changes, uh, to where when we go into retirement, we only have to tweak a couple of things instead of having this big laundry list of stuff to sort out. So those are the top seven. If you can think of one that I haven't covered, please, put it in the comments and I'll add it to the next update. Good luck with your retirement.