The Art of Successful Retirement

THE ART

of

SUCCESSFUL

RETIREMENT

A Life of Quality after a Life of Work

Roger Mayes

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2012 Roger William Mayes

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you are reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

CONTENTS

1. INTRODUCTION

2. SETTING THE SCENE

3. THE ROAD TO RETIREMENT

4. THINK FOR YOURSELF

5. QUALITY OF RETIRED LIFE

6. PREPARE FOR ACTION

7 DEVELOP YOUR PLAN

8. LIVE YOUR PLAN

9 TRAPS, ERRORS, AND THINGS NOT TO DO

10 A CASE HISTORY – ROGER MAYES

11 JUST ONE IDEA

12 REFERENCES AND CONTACTS

*******

1.INTRODUCTION

WHY THIS BOOK?

As we enter the second decade of the twenty first century, we find ourselves in a world confronting a number of significant problems. Many of these problems are of a material nature. According to the World Bank, despite the fact that poverty rates have declined significantly over the last twenty five years, there are still hundreds of millions of people living in absolute poverty, which is defined as being less than $1.25 per day. These people are overwhelmingly concentrated in the so-called developing world.

That same period has been a time of more or less steady economic growth in the developed world. During this period those individuals who formed the post WW2 population explosion known as the Baby Boom in the Western World have been enjoying the economic benefits of rapid technological developments in almost every field of human activity. Employment levels have been high, and the boomers have typically experienced steadily increasing standards of living associated with ever higher levels of financial prosperity. These people are now reaching the stage of their lives where they can put their feet up and enjoy the fruits of a life largely committed to increasing the financial well-being of the economy in general and themselves in particular. Surely such fortunate people can not have a care in the world.

Well, this is not necessarily the case. Many boomers have been so busy living the good life in the prosperous countries of the west that they have not given a thought to what will happen when the time comes for them to stop working. They have been so busy consuming whatever they have been able to earn that they are only now realising that a retirement of ease and comfort requires a certain amount of cash in the bank. Such people are now looking forward to spending their declining years either seeking what employment they can find, or being a burden on their relatives. However, many others have heeded the advice which regularly appears in the financial press and publications and have been steadily putting aside some of their hard-earned money to fund a retirement which will be at least financially independent. Surely then at least these people have not a care in the world.

Well, once again this is not necessarily the case. Making financial provision for retirement represents only one, admittedly very important, aspect of the thinking which is necessary for a happy retirement. Another aspect is how to actually spend the time which suddenly becomes available when a working life comes to an end. My personal observations and much anecdotal information indicates that very many people, through a lifetime of hard work and financial discipline, are putting themselves in a position to enjoy a rewarding retirement, but are failing to take advantage of the opportunity which they have earned themselves. Worse still, many such people experience fear, uncertainty, and stress when they encounter the reality of retirement. Just about anybody you speak to on the subject of retirement has morbid horror stories about someone they know who went into an immediate decline when they retired, and suffered depression, loss of health and in many cases premature death in the years following their retirement.

This book is aimed at such people, the ones who have spent years saving for and looking forward to retirement only to find that they don’t know how to go about it. More specifically it is intended to help the reader to avoid becoming one of those horror stories. Not only does it seek to help those who have already retired and are finding that the reality of retirement is not living up to the dream of golden years which has been somewhere in the back of the mind throughout the decades of working life, but even more it is aimed at those people who are reaching the final few years of work, and are just beginning to wonder what they are going to do about retirement. It seeks to do this by prompting the reader to think very clearly about the influences at work in our modern society, and the nature of both work and retirement, and to plan accordingly. It is my belief that a lack of clear thinking is the main cause of the problems which otherwise successful people experience when it comes to retiring from a working life. The Greek philosopher Socrates expressed the belief that an unexamined life is not worth living. An unexamined retirement may still be pretty good, but with a bit of careful thought about what retirement means to you, retirement can be the much more than that. Far from being a time of comfortable decline into old age, it can be a time of continuing personal growth and increasing quality of life.

It is my belief that those people who have managed to reach retirement age financially independent and in sound health are faced with the greatest, in fact the ultimate, opportunity of their lives. On a slightly more desperate note, it is also the last chance they will have to improve their lives! That it appears that so many such people experience fear, disappointment, and boredom when they retire genuinely upsets me. This should not be the case. People who have worked hard and managed their finances carefully to put themselves in a position to lead a satisfying retirement deserve better. This book is an honest attempt to help those people who have worked so hard for this opportunity to see retirement as something much more than just a postscript to their lives, and to encourage them to use the years left to them to add many years of quality living to their time on earth.

ABOUT ME – PART ONE

The content of this book is based largely on my own experiences of both working and retired life, so if you’re going to take any notice of what I say to you, then maybe you need to know a little bit about me. I am at the very forefront of the baby boom, a pioneering boomer. My parents got married in 1940, and the first letter they received when they returned from their short honeymoon to their new little love nest was my Dad’s call-up papers to serve in the British army for the duration of the Second World War. He obviously had some leave along the way, as my brother was born in 1943. Dad was eventually demobilised in early 1946, and I was born in November of that year. As the world tried to return to normality and make up for the lost years, the birth rate in those countries affected by the war surged, giving rise to what I remember at the time was referred to as the post war bulge, but has since become known as the Baby Boom.

I am, like everybody else, modelled by my early circumstances, a product of my time and place. I guess you would call my parents lower middle class conservatives. My Dad had left school at 14 without any qualifications, managed to get a job as an office boy at the height of the Great Depression and ended up working for the same organisation for 49 years, retiring as a director. My Mother went through Education College and became a primary school teacher until ill-health forced her to stay at home. Their combined backgrounds, embodying education, hard work, and loyalty, ensured that my brother and I were brought up immersed in the popular philosophy of the day – get the best education you can, then get the best job you can in the best organisation, work hard, live frugally, try and have some fun along the way, and one day you should be able to retire in some kind of comfort before dying and leaving a small inheritance to the next generation.

My life story so far has continued pretty much along that path. I was fortunate to be able to attend one of those centuries-old British schools where education is prized for its own sake rather than just as a process which ends in a school-leaving certificate. From there I went to University, emerging with a degree in Physics, and, by a fairly haphazard process which I describe elsewhere in this book, embarked on a career in what is now known as Information Technology but was then merely referred to as working in computers. I was never one of those fortunate people who have managed to follow a calling. What I did was always a job, a means of earning an income to support myself and my family. Despite that, I actually enjoyed the succession of jobs which formed what I refer to as my career. In particular I have always found the people in the IT industry to be good company, and the work offered a huge amount of variety and intellectual challenge. In the almost forty years I spent in the industry, it changed beyond all recognition. There was always something new. But Information Technology was never a calling for me. The motivation was always to earn an income rather than any thing inherent in the activity itself. Since my retirement I have not even attempted to keep abreast of what is happening in the industry, simply because there are much more interesting things for me to spend my time on. If I had been born to wealthy parents and had never had the need to work, then I certainly would not have had the career which I did have.

None of this makes me unique. Throughout my working life I have always taken a keen interest in my fellow workers, and what makes them tick. I even went to the extent of doing a three year university course in Psychology via distance learning in order to help me understand the motivations of my fellow workers, and, indeed, friends and contacts in many other professional environments. In addition to this formal background, I have, over the years, gained what I believe are insights into employee psychology by asking any number of my friends and colleagues about their thoughts and attitudes to their work and their lives. Also, in my later working years I was frequently in a position to act as a mentor to younger colleagues, giving me further opportunity to find out about the desires and motivations of corporate employees. The conclusion which I came to was that there was nothing unique about the way I viewed my work experience. In fact, in the corporate world my experiences were shared by almost all of those with whom I discussed the matter. No matter how much the corporate world tries to tell its employees that working for the corporation is a noble activity which will lead the along a path of personal growth and self actualization, very few people actually experience corporate life that way. I expand on this theme throughout this book, because I believe it is very important for the retirees to think clearly about what their careers have meant to them, and to contrast that with the opportunities which retirement can offer.

ABOUT ME – PART TWO

And so I came to the penultimate stage of the life story which I mapped out earlier, the retirement that comes just before the dying. I did a lot of thinking about this, because it appeared to me that it represented a great opportunity, and was worthy of a bit of planning. I tried to do a bit of reading on the subject, but the vast majority of books on retirement focus exclusively on the financial aspects – very important, I agree, but not what I was looking for. The organisation which I was working for as I approached retirement age had an employee assistance program which offered counselling and advice from professionals, and which included advice on the subject of retirement. I took advantage of this, and had a session with a delightful and very professional young lady who is a registered counselling psychologist. The only problem was that she was in her thirties, and had clearly not considered retirement, and certainly had no practical retirement experience. The process was interesting but useless as far as practical advice was concerned.

So it became apparent that I was largely on my own. I started my own retirement planning process about three years before I actually stopped working, and my only regret is that I did not start it sooner. The process which I went through forms the basis of this book.

As I write, it is more than six years since I stopped working. To say that I am happily retired is an understatement. During this time I have experienced a level of personal growth that would have been impossible whilst in paid employment. The quality of my life is better than at any other time in my adult life. I expand on my personal experience of retirement later in this book, but in summary my activities include the following:

→Although not gifted creatively or artistically, and have never considered myself as being good with my hands, I experience the satisfaction of creative activity through my woodwork – mainly making decorative jewellery and other boxes out of plain and veneered woods. These are mostly given away, any surplus I sell to recoup some of my costs. But the important thing is that I am much better at it now than when I started – It has been a vehicle for personal growth.

→I indulge my passion for nature and the outdoors through serving as an Honorary Officer of a local Parks Board, through nature photography, and through excursions into natural environments with my wife, who is a keen bird watcher.

→I keep myself fit through cycling and regular sessions at the gym, as well as playing field hockey at the Masters level.

→Any spare moments are filled by reading, which has been a lifelong passion. I never had enough time for reading in my working life. Still don’t!

→These activities have been interspersed with holidays and a certain amount of travel

→I have always enjoyed writing – letters to friends and newspapers, sales proposals and the like - and now I am writing a book!

But the important thing about my retirement is not the activities which I undertake, but the subjective feeling which I experience. The activities which define your retirement will differ, maybe dramatically, from mine. But if the feeling is the same, then you will undoubtedly be a successful retiree. I can best describe that feeling as one of being blessed to be able to explore the opportunities which a level of freedom offers. Given reasonable luck with my health, before me stretches a period of time equivalent to at least half of that which I spent working, and I am free to use these years to explore my own possibilities and potentialities. I find that opportunity more exciting than any opportunity ever offered by my years as a corporate employee.

I have exchanged my interest in my fellow employees for an even greater interest in my fellow retirees. The transition from worker to retiree is not always a simple one, and I have observed an interesting mix of reactions to this event. This book is the result of blending my own experiences with those of others whom I have observed.

In short, I am old enough to have garnered some experience in being retired, but young enough and energetic enough to invest some of my retirement time in evangelising my retirement message. I am not a professional psychologist, philosopher, or life skills counsellor, but I am ‘QBE’ – Qualified by Experience. I have made some mistakes, but I have also learnt, and feel that I have grown and continue to grow as a person. And I am convinced, from my own experience, that retirement does indeed offer the greatest opportunity of the typical retiree’s life. That is the short answer to the question why did you write this book?. I think I have something very important to share with people who are approaching retirement or already retired.

ABOUT YOU

I do not have as much to say about you as I do about myself, for the simple fact that I do not know you. But I have made a few assumptions, and these need to be spelt out up front.

As I have said previously, most of the books available on the subject of retirement deal exclusively with the financial aspects. One of the assumptions of this book is that you have already made financial arrangements for your retirement at least to the extent that you can survive on your retirement income. Financial independence is fundamental to a happy retirement, but great wealth is not. Elsewhere in the book I deal with the relationship between time and money in the retirement years. This relationship boils down to the established principle of supply and demand. Simply put, as the amount of time left to you decreases, so its value increases to the point where it cannot be reckoned in money terms.

So the first assumption which I have made about you is that financially you have provided adequately, whatever that may mean to you, for your retirement. But mankind has a subtler need