The Retirement Script – An online publication to educate people about retirement.

Will you retire?  What will you retire “to”?  What will you do?  What are your plans?

One of the great tragedies of American life are the people who work so hard until retirement, and then retire with nothing to do and die within one or two years.  Why does this happen?  Sometimes it isn’t illness, but the lack of a reason to get up and out and do things.  When you retire, do you still have a purpose?

Many of us have heard of a person who worked hard and saved and never took vacations because they wanted to have a great retirement, but then they had a heart attack and died before they reached their target retirement age.  Or you’ve heard of the person who retired with a plan, but their finances evaporated before their own eyes because their plan didn’t consider the possibility of certain downside issues.

What will you do in retirement?  Do you have a real plan?  Is it a reasonable plan?  Do others agree that the plan will likely work?

I had a client come in to see me and discuss his future.  He was in his mid-70s and had been retired for several years.  I recognized his unusual name from reading about him in the local newspaper years earlier, and I knew some of his colleagues.  I told him that I knew that he had been a big shot executive at a local company, and I had read about him.  He looked at me and replied, “And now I’m just a nobody and I stay home all day and watch tv by myself.”

Wow!  Such a turn of events and such a different person than who he had been.  He was shrinking, had given up on life, and didn’t see any bright future for himself.

Don’t let that be you!  Have a plan.

Does your plan include your spouse?  Are you both on the same page, so to speak, about your retirement?

One man, who had worked all his life, had great plans for spending time with his wife, who had never worked outside the home.  When he got ready for his third day of retirement, he asked his wife what was in the paper bag on the kitchen counter.  Her response?  “That’s your lunch.  You need to leave home every morning and do what you want, but this is my house and I have my own things to do every day.  Just come back home at 5:00, and I’ll see you for dinner.”

Ha!  The guy was shocked.  His view of retirement was to spend all day with his wife, but after two days of him hanging around all day, she laid down the law.  They had never discussed what his retirement would look like for the two of them.

An 85 year-old woman recently called my office, and my assistant said that she sounded almost suicidal.  She was out of money and she and her only child had had a falling out several months earlier.  When I went to see her and got further into the details, it was clear that she had lost some sense of reality.  She had no money, she hadn’t paid her property taxes in years, she didn’t answer the phone because of the calls from the bill collectors, she had a leaky roof, she was down to her last cans of food, and her furnace hadn’t worked for FOUR YEARS!  I’m not kidding.  Yes, the house is in Silicon Valley, so there’s no snow, but it can still get mighty cold.  She told me that she just wears a lot of sweaters.  (Note here that it was also an old house, and she informed me that it had no insulation.  Wow!)

I talked to her about a reverse mortgage to get some money and pay the bills and fix the house.  She was no longer concerned about giving anything to her child, so I encouraged her to get a reverse mortgage and take care of herself.  She thought the house was worth perhaps $1.2 million, but an online search showed it to be worth over $4 million, and most of the houses in the neighborhood were valued at $5.5 million to $9.5 million.  She certainly had more than $3 million of equity, but she had almost no food in the house and some days she went without food.

How did she get to this situation?  Isolation.  She cut herself off from everyone.  Her friends had died, her only family that she had contact with was the one child who no longer spoke with her, she didn’t drive, and she hadn’t left her house in over four years.

She didn’t seem to have any dementia, but did she have some mental illness?  Maybe.  I don’t know.  Judging by the part of the house that I saw, she was probably becoming a hoarder.

After she retired, she just stayed home, mostly alone, and declined bit by bit.

Some people are self-employed and work forever because they enjoy their work and the social contact with clients or customers or co-workers.  Others work for large companies and keep working because they enjoy their work and they have a special skill that they bring to their workplace, so the company wants them to continue even if it isn’t on a full-time basis.

If continuing to work isn’t for you, make a different plan.  Travel?  Buy an RV?  Babysit the grandkids?  Hike?  Bike?  Read books?  Volunteer?  Just have a plan.

I had one client in his early 90s who had absolutely loved his job at a huge company.  He wasn’t an engineer by training, but he spent all day working alongside brilliant engineers and creating new breakthroughs.  He explained that the best part of every day was leaving the house to go to work and huddle together with the brilliant minds he worked with to try and resolve product problems.  He retired in his mid-70s and then, quite to his dismay, he found out what a wonderful person his wife was.  Ha!

The couple had been married for over 50 years before he retired, and although they got along fine and he always loved her, he never realized what a great person she was until they were both retired and spending all day together every day.  They traveled, took cruises, volunteered to serve meals for the needy, ran bingo games to raise money for charitable causes, and much more.  They were having a great retirement life together and were busy every single day.  They had no boring days.

Yes, you have to stay healthy to enjoy retirement, but think about what you want to retire “to”?  What is your plan?  What is your vison?  Does your spouse or partner share the same vision?  If you’re already retired, how are things going?  Do you need to make some changes to have a better retirement?