Diary of a Mad Retiree – The Survival Guide!

Useful or inspiring, let me share with you what I have learned so far about early retirement.  After all, I have one full calendar year under my belt.  How difficult could early retirement really be!

Gainful Unemployment

I hate to be the messenger that begs not to be shot, but being gainfully unemployed is hard work!  Really hard work! 

During your very early days of retirement, it doesn’t take long to realize you are trapped somewhat in a paradox  …….

When you initially began to think about and plan your retirement, your motivation was not really in being “retired” …..

….. your real motivation was in “not working”. 

“Not working” is not the same thing as “being retired”.

 “Not working” is being on vacation.  “Not working” is a three-day, long weekend.  “Not working” is updating your Facebook page during business hours.

“Not working” is easy. 

“Retirement” is hard.

Because retirement is not simply ceasing to work.  It’s really a career change.

All of the time, energy and resources you originally devoted to getting your career off the ground, to managing your career for all of those years, now need to be turned to de-railing that self-same career and planning for another.  In fact, even more time, energy and resources need to go into planning your retirement.

They Laughed at Christopher Columbus, too!

Early retirement (or retirement in general) is not for the faint of heart, the unprepared, the procrastinator, the non-self-starter, the unmotivated or the disorganized.

Retirement, early or otherwise, takes planning.  I knew that!  Or at least I thought I did!  When word began to leak out that Vi had started a five-year countdown to early retirement – everyone laughed. 

Here’s my first mad retiree tip – five years may not be nearly enough!  If you can bring yourself to do it, a five to seven year planning arc before your official retirement date, may actually be more realistic.

The main reason everyone gives for “taking” retirement is that retirement will free up their time.  There will finally be enough time to “do” all of those things we’ve been dreaming about since we started our first day of full-time employment.

Well, time is definitely what you get when you retire.  Approximately 16 hours a day of free time.  Sixteen hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year.  If you have a spouse or children, some of those hours will automatically be filled for you.  If however, you are single with no children, like me, the responsibility to fill all of those hours falls on you and you alone.

If you have no plan, no list, no interests or hobbies to fall back on, you are very quickly going to find yourself in serious trouble.  During some of the initial days of my retirement, despite all of the planning I did, I found myself floundering, physically and psychologically, on more than one occasion.  You will be shocked at how quickly and insidiously you can turn into a couch potato.  It happened to me more often and more quickly than I am really willing to confess (at least two days within the first three or four months).  And the psychological angst these incidents caused me was not pretty.

 ........ next time ..... "There might be free food!"

Welcome to the early retirement world of the Mad Retiree!!

Are you hoping to retire soon?  Are you past hoping and beginning to plan?

And that’s about as far as you’ve managed to get …… beginning to plan.   And you’re anxious and just a little confused about exactly what “planning” for retirement actually means.  

Well, may I be of aide and assistance? 

I retired in the fall of 2012 with 31 years of career employment behind me and (hopefully) many years of career retirement ahead of me.  Like you, I knew I needed a retirement plan, something above and beyond the usual financial seminars.  A number of years prior to my official retirement date, I started “planning” anyway.  Or at least, I started getting ideas down on paper. 

And now with that self-same “plan” and 15 months of early retirement in hand, I think I’ve actually learned a thing or two about how you do this retirement-planning thing!  And I would very much like to share with you what I’ve learned! 

Before we get started …

I need everyone to know up-front that I am not a financial planner.   I cannot offer you any financial planning advice or wisdom.  Only the opinion, from my own experience, that you need to seriously start looking at your retirement finances no later than your early to mid-forties.  Especially if you are considering an “early” retirement and are carrying any debt or have children.  Please make an appointment with your bank manager or a financial planner.

If however, you have decided that financially, you can retire, I offer the following advice:

-          A monthly budget.  If you do not know exactly how much you do spend on a monthly basis, and more importantly, on what, get out a piece of paper and a pencil and start documenting every dime that runs through your fingers.  That includes mortgage/rent, cable, cell phone, house and car insurance, gas for the car, groceries, transit, license sticker renewal, etc.   Every dime.  And I do mean every dime.  All fixed and variable expenses.  And don’t forget “spending” money.  At least a year before you actually plan to retire (two years would be even better), you need to know where every last cent you earn is going.  And if you discover, that on a monthly basis, you are already spending more than you earn, don’t retire.  Start watching reruns of “’Til Debt Do Us Part”.

-          Don’t forget about income tax.  Take the monthly pension figure human resources gives you and skim at least 30% off of the top for income tax.  The figure you are left with is probably closer to the actual, monthly dollar amount on which you will have to live your retirement life.  If after considering this revised figure, you still plan to move ahead with retirement, sign all the tax forms that will come with your final batch of paperwork so that all income tax can be deducted at source.  Then deduct the cost of Ryerson’s medical and dental benefits.  And watch that monthly “pension income” drop even further.  (There is an upside though.  Medical and dental benefit costs are tax deductible.)

-          And I hate to report, but once retired, worrying about money is your new extra-curricular activity.  (Sorry about that!)  I have come to the conclusion that like nature, the sub-conscious abhors a vacuum.  All of the time and anxiety you used to expend fretting about your daily commute (traffic, packed subway cars, weather, etc.) is now spent worrying about money.   No matter how large your pension cheque, how tight and precise your monthly budget, every time a bill shows up in the mailbox, you start to panic (again) about whether or not you can “afford” to pay it.  My most fervent hope is that the anxiety about money lessens after about a year.  Once I have “lived” through one calendar year on my Ryerson pension, I will realize, deep down, that everything is going to be okay!



(.... stay tuned!  Even more wit and wisdom to come!)