But What Now?

Some of us are retiring earlier in life than others. We have good reasons for taking an early retirement. Speaking for myself, I want to retire early so that I can pursue a new vocation. I’m not even entirely sure what it is yet! Now, that doesn’t sound much like retirement, does it?

Really, though, it is. I will be retired and the way I look at working after I leave this job with a little bit of a pension and health insurance for life, is that I will most likely never feel the need to excel at a company or climb the corporate ladder or any of that stuff. I will have time to think about what I really want to do and not have the necessity of making a lot of money from it clouding my choices.

I will only do what I choose to do. If I want to work part time, I can work in a library, for example, and make much less money than I do now and it won’t matter. In other words, whatever I do, I will not be the manager and I will not take on the stress of the workplace and bring it home with me.

Not only that, but from what I have been reading in magazine articles, books and on the web for the past several years is that if I do what I love the money will follow! I just need to create the space to be and discover what that is. I have a feeling it will be more than just one thing, too.

So, when I say Retirement for the Rest of Your Life, what I really mean is that you will be, or already are, retired to a new phase of your life. You can go back to school, earn money from hobbies, or just do your hobbies for fun. You can volunteer or you can sit in front of the TV all day, although I wouldn’t recommend that.

For the rest of our lives, we’ll need and want something to do. Most of us will want to spend time with friends and family and make more friends. We’ll want to make a difference in our own lives and the lives of others. And now we have time to do that.

If we love to write, instead of having our best hours in the morning stolen from us by our employer, we can schedule a writing period and stick to it. We can schedule our own lives.

Sometimes I wonder how I’ll ever make it through this last year at work. I have to keep going back to read my own post about that! I have my strategies and they work better on some days than others.