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    How to Survive Retirement: Reinventing Yourself for the Life You?ve Always Wanted
    How to Survive Retirement: Reinventing Yourself for the Life You?ve Always Wanted
    How to Survive Retirement: Reinventing Yourself for the Life You?ve Always Wanted
    Ebook172 pages2 hours

    How to Survive Retirement: Reinventing Yourself for the Life You?ve Always Wanted

    By Steven D. Price

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    About this ebook

    You’ve worked hard for the better part of four or five decades, and now you’ve decided it’s time to call it quits. Or your employer or industry regulations may have made that decision for you. What now?

    Although a life of ease may have been your dream, retirement brings with it a host of questions, problems, and responsibilities that never occurred to you and now may seem insurmountable. How to Survive Retirement will help you plan for most any eventuality during the golden years.

    The book is divided into four major areas:

    Making The Break: The emotions of retirement.
    Where Did The Money Go?Financial considerations
    I Don’t Feel So GreatPhysical/medical aspects of retirement.
    Hey, Look What I Did!Filling leisure time.

    Doing nothing may become the hardest thing you’ve ever done. However, thanks to this survival guide, you’ll be able to enjoy the rest of your life.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSkyhorse
    Release dateJul 21, 2015
    ISBN9781632209962
    How to Survive Retirement: Reinventing Yourself for the Life You?ve Always Wanted
    Author

    Steven D. Price

    Steven D. Price is the author or editor of more than forty books, including the bestselling The Whole Horse Catalog, the prize-winning The American Quarter Horse, The Quotable Horse Lover, and All the King’s Horses: The Story of the Budweiser Clydesdales. He lives in New York City, rides whenever and wherever he can, and numbers Don Burt among the finest horsemen he’s known.

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      How to Survive Retirement - Steven D. Price

      1

      ENTERING RETIREMENT

      Retirement may be looked upon either as a prolonged holiday or as a rejection, a being thrown on to the scrap-heap.

      —Simone de Beauvoir

      Madame de Beauvoir’s observation is an excellent, if grim, way to approach the subject of retirement. Some people facing departure from the workforce do so with a sigh of relief and a deep smile of satisfaction. They’re the ones who planned ahead to make sure they have an adequate financial cushion or, although less likely, who come upon a windfall in the form of selling one’s business for big bucks, hitting the lottery for a dream payoff (hey, it can happen), or coming into money through marriage or inheritance. They accept the fact that they paid their dues on the job, but time marches on and it’s time to call it quits. They know how, where, and with whom they want to spend their declining years—yes, declining, because they also face the inevitable fact that the old gray mare, she ain’t what she/he used to be, and, like the aged equines, they will continue to grow long in the tooth.

      Yes, blessed are they who retire with such an attitude and with sufficient resources to make a seamless transition to another stage of life. However, fewer and fewer of us will have such a cloudless blue sky. Therefore, much of how you’ll feel about facing the future will depend on the circumstances that surround your leave-taking.

      * * * * * *

      Easy transitions into retirement are becoming rarer and rarer. The days when a valued employee toiled until age sixty-five, received a gold watch and a hearty handclasp from the boss at a retirement dinner, and then spent the remaining golden years puttering in a garden, collecting stamps, or playing checkers at the lodge hall are receding into the mists of time. On the other hand, retirements have become as much forced as they are voluntary. Companies downsize or outsource individual jobs and entire departments and divisions. They relocate or go bankrupt. They implement new technologies that require different and usually more complex skill sets. Employees at all levels who fully expected to work for another decade or more find themselves adrift and unable to contend with the present job market.

      The last example above hit home to members of the domestic-travel and meeting-planning department at a large, multinational corporation. The department was outsourcing to another country, leaving some thirty employees without jobs. Several were in their mid- to late sixties and planned to retire within the next few years, so the announcement that the department was being eliminated, while startling, didn’t dismay them. Younger ones, especially administrative assistants, were able to find positions in other departments. If they didn’t, they believed with youthful self-assurance that they would land on their feet in record time.

      The unhappiest employees, with good reason, were the fifty-somethings. Many were no longer full of energy, drive, and optimism, and they were well aware of the tight job market, especially for workers in their age bracket. Severance pay might tide them over for a while, but unemployment insurance alone would not sustain them, nor would eroded 401(k) revenues, revenues that are subject to penalties for early withdrawal. Although some had working spouses, others didn’t. Many had children to support, including the grown children who couldn’t find a job and were living at home. To say they were traumatized would be understatement.

      I felt as though the moon and stars hit me, one later recalled. "My initial reaction was ‘I’m all washed up.’ Although my supervisor kept reassuring me that my being handed my walking papers had absolutely nothing to do with my job performance or my personality, I couldn’t help personalize the situation. ‘Nothing to do with me? The hell it doesn’t—it’s only my life!’ That’s also what I told the poor human resources administrator who had the bad luck to be the one who gave me my exit interview. She had to ask me form questions like ‘Did you enjoy your job? Have you any recommendations about your position that might improve the company?’ I’m sorry to admit I hit the ceiling—‘yes, I enjoyed my job,’ I told her, ‘now give it back to me,’ although I used stronger language than that.

      The one positive thing that the HR administrator did when I had finished my rant was to suggest I see a retirement coach, someone who could help ease the emotional aspects of the transition. In spite of my agitated state, I was able to see the value of such help, and I took the coach’s contact information. When I felt in a more receptive frame of mind, I had a few sessions. Talking things through helped a lot. In fact, I’m now considering going into that line of work. Hell, I have the experience for it.

      Being forced to leave a professional partnership—whether a law firm, group medical practice, architecture firm, or another variety—is fraught with emotional consequences. You may have once been your law firm’s rainmaker, bringing in new business right and left, but your connections in the business world and in certain industries grew progressively weaker with the passage of time. And just as your connections were fading, a younger lawyer whom your firm had been courting because of her rainmaking abilities decided to join. Shortly thereafter came the news that your services were no longer needed.

      Or a boutique specialty department of another law firm has seen the handwriting on the wall that the firm was in serious financial trouble. For that firm, getting out while the getting was good made sense, and the lawyers moved en masse to your firm. Unfortunately for you, their specialty was yours, and the new team convinced your firm’s partners that they could get along quite nicely without you. In these uneasy economic times, the firm’s executive committee agreed.

      In either instance, even with a substantial buyout package, you found yourself with your tail between your legs when you left the offices where you spent the past forty-five years. Your feelings were injured, and you had a sense of dread that your productive life was as dead as the firm’s founders whose portraits hung on the reception area walls.

      That was the experience of a lawyer who stayed on at his firm with the designation of counsel when he retired. Although no longer a partner, he went into the office or stayed in touch in case he was needed for consultation work. Much to his dismay and chagrin, his opinion was rarely sought, much as he prowled the corridors offering assistance. Nor were fellow lawyers terribly eager to include him in lunches or other social plans above and beyond office parties. Tired of swallowing bitter pills, he bowed out as gracefully as possible until, like Alice in Wonderland’s Cheshire Cat, he gradually disappeared and only his name remained on the firm’s letterhead.

      Equally, if not even more, emotionally difficult is a forced retirement from a family business. The classic example of siblings ganging up on one of their own for a variety of reasons often has nothing to do with the retiree’s job performance. Somewhat less prevalent is the case of children who decide that a parent who built the business up from nothing no longer has the vision or energy to continue at the helm.

      One such example of the latter involved a small, family-owned hardware chain. Grandpa opened the first store when the community was a small town. He expanded the business and opened two other stores as the town became a city with expanding suburbs. When his two sons joined the business, they became restless and thought about new worlds to conquer. The nursery business appealed to them, since their stores already carried many of the necessary gardening tools.

      Dad took an instant dislike to the idea. He and his sons hadn’t a clue about running a garden shop, plus there were two very successful nurseries shops within a half-hour drive of all three of their stores.

      The sons persisted. They accused their father of lacking the fire in the belly zeal that turned the one-store business into a chain (even if the chain had only three stores). When they asked their mother’s opinion, Mom’s siding with her boys upset her husband even further. Dad, who knew when he was beaten, quit in a fit of pique before the family-owned corporation could vote him out. I threw in the towel, he insisted, "but they made me do

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