Retirement -How Do You Get It Right?

Whenever I thought about retirement when I was younger and it seemed a long way off, I just imagined a time when work was history and I would be totally free to wander at will. Do what I want, when I want.
However what I’ve discovered is that retirement isn’t that easy.

My first thoughts about retirement occurred when I was 45 years old. Work was getting harder and harder. As a company, and I’m sure we were not unique, people were being lost through natural wastage and not being replaced. I found myself doing more and more and working longer hours.
I worked in an environment ruled by legislation whether that was Health and Safety at Work, Employee Legislation, Health and Hygiene Legislation or more specific laws relating to Customs and Excise and Gaming. Any major change was always accompanied by a one day workshop or if more complicated and in-depth by up to a week away being retrained. Suddenly the internet and more importantly powerpoint displays and email replaced these in person training sessions with missiles of training material displayed on the computer to print off and read or just read and store. There was no interaction and more importantly no one to answer your questions. This was apparently evolution. I began to question for the first time ever whether I wanted to be part of this anymore but with two children depending on me it felt like there was no escape so I plotted my exit. Ten years and counting……
My children by then would be 21 and 23 and, therefore, hopefully off hand. I dreamt of selling my house and buying a two bedroom flat and more importantly a motorhome. Off I envisioned going, in my motorhome, to explore initially the UK and then Ireland and ultimately Europe and beyond. That dream kept me going until two major changes occurred. Firstly I left my career before my planned retirement and secondly five months after this I met my now husband.

I retrained and began a new work life in a completely different arena ultimately working for myself. However it became so successful that hubby and I became like passing ships in the night and never really saw each other except sometimes at weekends. As a result with very little notice we booked a week off and took ourselves off to Cornwall to take a breather and to dedicate one entire day to the future. Could this current lifestyle continue? Were we happy? How could we change it?
Completely out of left field we realised we could survive without my income and that my pension pot could temporarily remain untouched whilst hubby worked for another five years to pay the bills. His financial contribution over those five years meant that this money combined with his pension pot was nearly in line with my own and so, with just two weeks notice to my clients, on February 19th, only six days after I had originally planned to retire all those years ago, I stopped working.

I had no plan. I’d not thought about what I was going to do as a lady of leisure. Suddenly it had happened and my paid working life was behind me. The lists that had ruled my life in order to keep me on track both at work and at home could perhaps now disappear.
Initially it felt like being on holiday but this feeling soon wore off. There was an element of guilt that he was going out to work each day and I was at home. There was that old fashioned view in my head that now I wasn’t working I should be filling my time being a dutiful housewife so he could come home to a home cooked meal, a neat, tidy and clean house and that I was somehow accountable to him for my time.
Instead of ditching the “to do lists” I found myself filling my time with them. Tasks that I’d always meant to do when I was working but never got round to. Those jobs when you are working where you say to yourself “oh I’ll do it on my next day off” or “When I have a week off from work I’ll get that done”. But you never do get them done because life is already hectic enough and weirdly when you get time off you actually want to spend it being happy and enjoying yourself.
It began to feel like I was working at home for no pay. After six months this all came to a head and I actually began to talk about going back to work.

Just as we were beginning to unraffle all these feelings, life took another turn when my sister became ill and I had to take on her care. Suddenly my time was being filled travelling up and down the motorway, ensuring she was fed and comfortable whilst picking through the end of her ten year relationship and securing her somewhere new to live. Time at home was spent chasing the social services, mental health team and learning about her ailment -disassociative amnesia, which I’d previously had no knowledge of. Professional support was sporadic and I found myself falling back on my management skills to devise strategies and implement aids to make her daily life easier and of course there were the inevitable lists. I didn’t want to “drop the ball” so to speak balancing her care alongside our life at home.

Fast forward eighteen months and Covid took over the world and suddenly both hubby and I were at home and our lives took on another new dimension. In terms of my retirement it forced me into relinquishing some of the responsibility for my sister as I couldn’t visit so she had to take more care of herself, within a supported style living environment, with me solely on the other end of a telephone.
Hubby returned to work after three months but Covid rolled on with the final lock down releasing us back to normal life another thirteen months later.

I did manage to take up some exercise once local leisure facilities reopened but with a wedding to plan, that had already been postponed twice due to Covid, the lists came back into play. Returning from the honeymoon having decided that we should head off travelling for six months in less than a year’s time, the lists came back again. “Microsoft To Do” was my fallback zone. Add it to a list so you don’t forget Tina!

Wedding and honeymoon over and travelling complete, hubby then retired. Suddenly we were both at home full-time. It felt odd. The reality of retirement seemed to be staring me in the face. We planned to go out once a week to enjoy ourselves and revel in this new found combined freedom but the weather or some other seemingly urgent task meant we didn’t have time and the lists kept being ticked off.

Roll forward to hubby’s recent serious illness and it was as if nature was once again taking control and making me take stock. With hubby in hospital all those things to do on those lists were suddenly my sole responsibility. Trying to balance visiting him which took a minimum of two and a half hours a day, maintaining my exercise schedule to help my own health issues, keeping on top of everything at home whilst also ticking things off the “to do lists” very quickly became a strain. It was as if once again the universe was talking to me and telling me something needed to change.
What happened next sounds so simple but whilst hubby was in hospital I took myself off to visit a friend one Sunday. Whilst we had worked in entirely different careers she had also experienced the balancing act of hitting deadlines at work whilst overseeing her home and family and understood “the list” phenomenon.
She is still working having retired for three months and then taken up a temporary position for three months that grew into six months, nine months and beyond. Her one question to me was “who is putting this pressure on you to deliver on these to do lists?” The realisation was “Me”. I was doing this to myself. It was the way I’d worked for nearly forty years. It was ingrained.

When I got home that day it was as if I had truly had an epiphany. One of my philosophies in life has always been “Everyone deserves to be happy and if you aren’t happy then only one person can change that, you!’
Here I was in charge of my own happiness, my own destiny and all I needed to do was change my outlook. Stop using to do lists and just do what I want. I set about condensing the lists, then removing any dates attached to the tasks and weirdly just this process changed my mindset. This wasn’t a to do list anymore this was merely a reminder of things I needed or wanted to do. No one was controlling me. I could actually be retired as I had planned, doing what I want when I want and so six years on from retiring I now actually feel retired. My life is happier, definitely has less pressure and time spent on my hobbies increases each week.

Life is a continual learning curve and there, no doubt, will be many people out there reading this and thinking “Why did it take her so long to realise this?” or ” that’s hardly revolutionary”. But I’ve learnt that retirement is an evolution not a revolution. There is no right or wrong way of doing retirement, it’s about creating a new world for yourself that you are happy with. That allows you the freedom, having shaken off the shackles of work, to be happy in your own new world.

I do appreciate that some people would consider us lucky to have visited the places we have already and done some of the stuff we’ve done. But we are not lucky, we were just sensible. Money buys you freedom and we both worked hard to pay into a pension fund so that we didn’t have to rely solely on the state pension. The UK OAP pension scheme doesn’t pay us out anything until we are 67 and yes it, on its own, will give you freedom from work but not necessarily happiness and a stress free lifestyle.

The lesson that the universe has recently taught both hubby and I is one we thought we already had under our belt ” life is not forever”.
When you are listening to a heart surgeon tell you “had you not collapsed you would never have had these tests and you would never have known about this anomaly you have with your heart and in two years, three years tops you would have collapsed and died” is a sobering, some would say, life altering moment.

It makes you stop in your tracks and really ask yourself the question “If this is your last day on this earth, what would you regret?” It sure as hell isn’t that you failed to mop the kitchen floor today or forgot to empty the dishwasher. It isn’t the wall you never got around to painting in the bedroom or the lawn that never got mowed on its two weekly schedule. It’s missing out on what makes you happy. It’s not being able to create any more memories with the people you love. If you are like us and enjoy holidays and travelling, it’s running out of time to tick off all those places you wanted to visit and explore.