Unretirement Project

Retirement Redefined

  • Home
  • About
  • Contact
You are here: Home / Retirement Planning / Retirement Planning: It’s About More Than Just Not Working Anymore

Retirement Planning: It’s About More Than Just Not Working Anymore

February 17, 2021 by Sharlyn Lauby Leave a Comment

wall art everything is figuroutable like retirement planning

The COVID-19 pandemic is forcing older workers to examine their job options. In an article on CNN.com, an economist mentions that young workers’ participation in the labor force has almost fully recovered, while older workers and women are recovering more slowly. I’m sure this has prompted individuals to say to themselves, “Am I ready for retirement?”.

Making the decision to retire involves more than simply deciding not to work anymore. It includes financial planning (Do I have enough money?), healthcare planning (Can I take care of my medical needs?), and emotional planning (Am I emotionally ready?). Over the past year, we’ve written about some of these topics and we thought it might be helpful to have them as a reference in one place.

Retirement Planning: 5 Reasons to Have a Stop Working Date

It’s very easy to simply pick the government’s age for collecting Social Security as your retirement date. But if I had a dollar for every person who turned 62 or 65 and said, “I’m not ready yet.” I would be retired right now. LOL! No one is holding you to that date. It’s simply a placeholder for planning. And retirement planning is important.


Retirement Success: We Need to Learn About Happiness

Happiness means knowing what will make us happy. In our retirement life, we will often have to deal with trade-offs. For example, we can travel often but our accommodations might be economy. Versus traveling less but more luxuriously. Or we can retire earlier but it means downsizing and paying off a mortgage. Or we can work longer, but it means becoming a freelancer or contractor without corporate healthcare insurance. For us to make good decisions, we need to truly understand what makes us happy. 


5 Ways We Can Bridge Our Retirement Gap

Statistically, we know that people are living longer. The challenge is that we’re not financially preparing to live longer. The financial shortfall between how much we need for retirement and how much we have has been labeled “the retirement gap”. The retirement gap is a global retirement planning issue and it’s growing, especially in the United States. The bottom-line is that individuals need to prepare for retirement because Social Security wasn’t designed to cover 100% of our retirement expenses. 


Is It Possible to Flunk Retirement

In today’s business world, we appear to be much more accepting of failure than ever. Billionaires like Sir Richard Branson and Spanx founder Sara Blakely remind us that it’s okay to make mistakes. But I can see how people could feel different about flunking at 20 than flunking at 60. We have to view our unretirement and retirement as a journey. A journey that starts early in life. Will there be stumbling blocks and changes along the way? Absolutely. But that doesn’t mean we’ve flunked life or our retirement. It does mean that we need to find ways to adjust.


The Pros and Cons of Being a One Car Household

One of the things to consider in retirement planning is transportation as in, “How much do you want to drive?” The answer might prompt you to take some action like moving from the suburbs to a more walkable community. Or maybe downsize vehicles to something smaller and/or more fuel efficient. Or you might do what we did and simply become a one-car household.



Should You Keep “To-Do” Lists After You Retire

As a person who likes to plan, I make lists. Granted, all of my lists aren’t created equal. For example, I plan our meals using lists. It helps us save money on groceries and we don’t waste food. I also have a list of small tasks that I need to complete during the day like “buy tickets to see Bohemian Rhapsody on Friday”. I can’t imagine when I retire that I would stop making those types of lists.

Regardless of where you are in your retirement planning process, making sure to think about all of the aspects involved in retirement is important. I’d like to think that anyone considering retirement wants to know they’re as ready as they can possibly be for the future. 

Filed Under: Money, Retirement Planning Tagged With: retirement planning, unretirement

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Let’s Connect

  • Facebook
  • RSS
  • Twitter

Stay Updated!

Sign up to receive news, updates, and tips delivered right to your inbox!

Top Unretirement Articles

  • wall art everything is figuroutable like retirement planning Retirement Planning: It’s About More Than Just Not Working Anymore
  • wall art with the sentence the time of your life while healthy aging Healthy Aging is Trendy Thanks to Global Shift
  • wall art work it on career plans Older Workers Should Think About Their Short and Long Term Career Plans
  • wall sign with phrase oh the places you will go speaking out against ageism Aging Doesn’t Have to Lead to Ageism
  • computer desk image showing an image of a sign with caution rockstar at remote work Can Remote Work Be a Way to Phase Into Retirement?

Copyright © 2021 Unretirement Project · A division of ITM Group, Inc.

Copyright © 2021 · Metro Pro Theme on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in