Retirement Planning Tips – Make Your Retirement Life More Rewarding Than Your Career Life!
Retirement Planning Tips – Make Your Retirement Life More Rewarding Than Your Career Life!
We have to be at least a little skeptical of some of the information about retirement that the media and researchers throw our way. There is a lot of contradictory information as to whether retirement is generally a positive or negative experience. Adopting either side of the argument can affect how happy each of us is when we retire.
Some researchers have come to the conclusion that retirees experience less life satisfaction than working people. Other researchers have found that young retirees are less happy compared to similarly aged people still in the workplace. Still other researchers have concluded that retirement contributes to depression, and even suicide in the extreme cases.
According to economist Kerwin Kofi Charles of the University of Michigan, there is truth to these research findings. The presentation of the facts, however, is misleading. It’s a case of which came first – the chicken or the egg? In other words, do depressed people contribute disproportionately to the number of the retired or does retirement contribute disproportionately to the numbers of depressed people?
Kerwin Kofi Charles used data from three extensive federal studies of older Americans. He confirmed the conventional wisdom that “the association between retirement and well-being is negative.” Put another way, retired people as a group are more depressed than working people.
Yet, surprisingly, Kerwin Kofi Charles found that retirement doesn’t add to the number of depressed people. Instead, it’s the other way around. Depressed people or those who recently suffered serious emotional upheavals are more likely to retire than people with more positive dispositions. Thus, people who already have the blues disproportionately increase the ranks of retirees.
There is one more interesting aspect to the research conducted by Kerwin Kofi Charles. When he tried to account for the relationship between retirement and happiness amongst well-balanced individuals, there was nothing to worry about. “Retirement appears to actually improve well-being,” he wrote in his study.
People all too often fear retirement because they focus on what they are giving up instead of what they are gaining. Instead of seeing retirement as something to be avoided at all costs, they should look at it as a phase of life that can be filled with joy, fun, challenge, excitement, and satisfaction.
A more positive view of retirement can result in a much more rewarding life than work. Retirees can live the lifestyle they want to live instead of the one they had to live while employed. Active retirees find many interesting things to do, and have more time to do them. Here are seven retirement quotes and retirement sayings relating to how much enjoyment people are finding in retirement.
- Seven Retirement Sayings and Retirement Quotes Extolling the Positive Aspects of Retirement
I really stay busy [in retirement]. I often have to cancel my golf games on the weekends to go play in tennis tournaments. – Richard Davies
The key to retirement is to find joy in the little things. – Susan Miller
I enjoy waking up and not having to go to work. So I do it three or four times a day. – Gene Perret
Retirement itself is the best gift. No gold watch could ever top it. – Abigail Charleson
I am a free man. I feel as light as a feather. – Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, Peruvian diplomat (On his retirement from Secretary-General of the U.N.)
Happiness is being retired and spending all of my kids’ inheritance before I die! – Unknown wise person
I still find each day too short for all the thoughts I want to think, all the walks I want to take, all the books I want to read, and all the friends I want to see. – John Burrough
In short, leaving behind the demands of a job allows for a more balanced life involving a broader range of interests, activities, routines, and relationships. Millions of well-balanced retirees are enjoying retirement life for all its worth. Indeed, some of these retirees are so busy that they don’t know how they ever had time for work. Not only should this convince you that retirement can be a positive experience, this should give you the motivation to find a hundred or two hundred activities that will add to add to your retirement life.
Ernie Zelinski is a leading authority on early retirement and solo-entrepreneurship.
Ernie is the author of the recently released “Real Success Without a Real Job: The Career Book for People Too Smart to Work in Corporations”, the bestseller “How to Retire Happy, Wild, and Free: Retirement Wisdom That You Won’t Get from Your Financial Adviser” (over 75,000 copies sold and publlished in 7 foreign languages), and the international bestseller “The Joy of Not Working: A Book for the Retired, Unemployed, and Overworked” (over 225,000 copies sold and published in 17 languages).
Check out Ernie’s:
Download the Free E-book version of Ernie’s bestselling How to Retire Happy, Wild, and Free at: