A Brief Guide to Enjoying Your Retirement

Retirement is at once a sour and sweet word. It comes with connotations of age and irrelevance, and yet also with promise of freedom and contentment – though it is harder to see the ‘contentment’ side of the equation as financial issues continue to lay bare the cracks in our economy long-term. Still, a retirement is something to be enjoyed; how can you enjoy it?

Financial Management

Before you can start to pay proper attention to the fun stuff – and, indeed, in order to guarantee that you can invest time, energy and money into the things you enjoy – you will first need to make sure that your finances are all in order. This is a dry task but a supremely necessary one, if not for the health of your rainy day fund then for the maintaining of your ideal standard of living.

There are a few different strands to pull here. For one, there’s pension and savings concerns – which together give you the exact amount you’ll have to spend in your retirement years. From here, budgets can be drawn, enabling you to earmark exactly how much you can afford towards enjoyable activities on a monthly basis. Somewhat morbidly, you may also want to allocate some of that budget to over 50 life insurance; should one of your activities result in your premature death, a life insurance policy would protect your loved ones.

Investing in Home

Before you lean into big-ticket fun-time investments, you should also earmark some money for making renovations to your home environment – to make it not only more accessible, but more enjoyable to boot. Small conveniences can make a major difference to your day-to-day happiness, such as a bath with a door on it for easy entrance and egress. A stairlift can ensure you are not ‘locked out’ of half your home by ailing joint health in your advanced years.

These investments could also be simply for the sheer fun of it. You might completely renovate a spare bedroom to become some kind of recreational space, whether to indulge a long-postponed hobby or to harbour keepsakes from your eventual adventures.

Keeping Active

Generally speaking, keeping active is an excellent habit to keep in retirement. While you may have decades of good health and fitness ahead of you, this is not guaranteed. Staying fit by walking and participating in sports can help keep your physical health tip-top, ensuring you get the most out of everything in the process.

Socialising

The final muscle that needs exercising in service of an enjoyable retirement is the social one, so to speak. Retirement can be an inadvertently isolating experience, as you lose the hub by which many of your friendships may have been made – the workplace. It is crucial to actively engage with others where possible, from arranging to see family regularly to attending social clubs for hobbies you may enjoy. For those of an especially advanced age, social occasions can also have dramatic impacts for life expectancy!