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.
