Retirement

Having been retired for exactly one month, I have discovered that bureaucracy rules. I spend time every day calling some “organization” about my pension or my medical supplement or some other aspect of this life-changing event, or visiting organizational offices in person. I find it ironic that, in this time when I am supposed to be approaching senility, I need my wits about me more than ever.

Every day, a new package of information or blank forms arrives in my snail mailbox. In pursuing my understanding of the information, I find that there are often elements that are missing or not clear (hence my phone calls or visits). Some of the forms I’ve faced are incomprehensible to me (hence more phone calls or visits). And every day I struggle to get things in place before I need them.

I also wonder how many of us face this on retirement. In talking to retired persons I know, they assure me that this is the “norm” when retirement begins. While these anecdotes are not scientific, they are reassuring to me, in that I’m not the only one who faces this initial challenge to retirement. On the flip side, they are worrying to me because, at the moment, I have my full mental capacities (or so I think) and I am able to question organizations’ representatives and challenge elements I don’t think are correct. How many retirees are able to ensure that they receive their full benefits in pension and in medical benefits? My fear is that some slip through the cracks, although, for the most part, the people with whom I’ve spoken genuinely want to help.

I also wonder if we need to create some sort of voluntary “pods” of people (expert on social security, expert on IRAs, expert on Medicare, expert on medical supplements, expert on estates, expert on … whoever is needed). Certainly, we can hire CPAs, lawyers, financial advisors, and so on, but what about those who can’t afford to do that. How do we help them? How do we identify those people and put them together with what help is available? A complex issue not easily solved.

Image credit: https://murraygv.wordpress.com/2016/09/08/forms-and-letters/

Or perhaps I should say “evening 1.” After working full-time for decades, I left work at the end of the afternoon for the last time. I have felt strange for days and I anticipate feeling equally strange tomorrow morning when I wake to others preparing to go to work and I have the entire day ahead of me with nowhere I have to go.

Retirement is an odd concept. For centuries, people worked until they were unable to do so, at which point their families (nuclear or extended) took care of them until they died, which was generally not too long after they were unable to continue working.

The Atlantic offers an interesting online article called “How Retirement Was Invented.” Apparently, in 1881, “Otto von Bismarck, the conservative minister president of Prussia, presented a radical idea to the Reichstag: government-run financial support for older members of society,” i.e., retirement. By 1889, the German government created a retirement system, which provided for citizens over the age of 70—if they lived that long. The U.S. began offering pensions about the same time and the concept of retirement with a pension has evolved from then. Today, people fear that the system will break and that pensions will not be available to our next generations. But I am one of the “lucky” ones—an early baby-boomer with a pension.

I put the word “lucky” in quotes because there are a number of factors that make retirement lucky or not. A primary consideration is health: how long I’ll live and what state I’ll be in as I age. If I’m lucky, I’ll have some years of health and energy. Another consideration is the length of my life and what I choose to do with the time I have left. The length of my life is largely out of my control (eat right, exercise is mine, but genetics?). What I choose to do is the part I control.

The key to my time now is that it’s “unstructured.” That means I can easily fritter it away. How easy it will be to put off to tomorrow what I don’t feel “motivated” to do today. I don’t know if that will happen to me, but, prior to today, my last day, I prepared a schedule for myself to try to forestall that. I may not stick to it every day and it will require tweaking as I identify more things I want to do, but I did it to forestall frittering. I don’t want to get five years into retirement, look back, and see that I’ve not made a difference in some way, accomplished something.

For retirement is not a matter of retiring to my bed or my house and putzing around. Retirement is an opportunity to focus on activities and goals I want to achieve—spend time with my grandson (when I can), travel, write, quilt, sing, play the piano, improve my French—and a hundred other things. I won’t achieve them all, but I will achieve some of them and enrich this period of my life. For I am not really retiring. I’m transitioning to a new period of accomplishment. It’s just that, in most cases, I won’t be paid and I will be the driving force that makes them happen.

Image: https://hackernoon.com/start-now-to-retire-young-retire-rich-8a179660adfb