About three weeks before I retired, I decided I should look at some articles about retirement planning. Apparently I was about five to 40 years late. Fortunately, nearly six years into actual retirement, it’s all worked out anyway.
There are, of course, plenty of people who never plan to retire, including an 80-year-old I chatted with recently. For her, it makes sense. She’s in sales, sets her own hours, loves meeting new people, and, as she confessed, she just wouldn’t know what to do with herself if she retired.
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Then there’s one of my much younger tennis buddies who sighs with envy every time one of us mention we can do something almost any day of the week. “I can’t wait to retire,” she says. She’s already attending seminars on retirement put on by her company and has a date 18 months or so from now in mind. I have no doubt that her retirement will be well planned.
Most advice about retirement — the kind you’re supposed to start years ahead — includes financial advice and developing interests outside of work. Reading that, I didn’t worry that the second one would be a problem. I knew I wanted to play more tennis, take some classes, travel, etc. What surprised both my husband and me was how well we had done, inadvertently, in the financial planning part.
Despite always being on the low end of salaries for our professions, not being particularly achievement oriented (or perhaps willing to do the work to be that way) and not fully looking into what retirement could/would cost, we lucked out. Many years before, I had wisely taken the advice of my elders and stuck the maximum into my 401k, which also included matching contributions from my employer. Was I saving for retirement? Not really. I was just thinking that any way I could get more money out of my employer was a good thing. I didn’t always pay attention to the people who offered advice on how to invest it either, although that may have saved me from some unwise decisions where most of it would have disappeared. Matching contributions eventually disappeared followed by newsroom wide pay cuts, but by then I had a healthy nest egg. Never underestimate the value of consistent saving.
Even more amazing (and I admit this with a great deal of embarrassment), my husband’s work at the University of California was rewarded with a lovely pension that neither of us were aware of until he retired. I’m not sure we would have done anything differently, but it seems like something we should have known.
Some people would call all this planning. I’m inclined to think it was dumb luck. If you’re heading toward retirement soon, I hope that either of those works for you.
“Life is not as serious as the mind makes it out to be.” — Eckhart Tolle, self-help guru and author.
Financial planners would probably disagree. I often find Tolle more annoying than right, but this statement seems to work for me.
I got lucky too. I worked for the state for 25 years, in several different jobs, almost by coincidence. I would get my paycheck stub every month and be annoyed by how much money was taken out for the pension plan. I was such a fool but must have had a financial guardian angel or something.
No place I ever worked looked beyond the next issue, so I made what I thought was a perfect retirement plan: work too hard, play too hard—smoke too much, drink too much, eat anything I liked, sleep too little, stay single—and die young. Fate being what it is, that left me where I am, fully dependent on Social Security and Medicare, collossally grateful for rent control and good health, cheerfully resident in a city where car ownership is a frivolity, an improbable member of the 20 per cent of my generation who are still alive.