We’ve got all the tips you need to make the most of your new-found free time, from keeping fit and healthy to making the mental adjustment. If a happy retirement is what you’re seeking, here are tips to make it happen.
1. Get Your Finances In Order
You will need to figure out how much money you will have to live on once you retire. Reducing your spending and pay off your debts leading up to retirement will make it easier to transition. Find any old pensions you have, claim your state pension, and check for other benefits you may be eligible for.
2. Wind Down Gently
One way to make retirement easier is to retire in stages. This means reducing your workload over a period of years so you have time to get used to not working and find other things to do. You can ask your employer if you can work fewer hours.
3. Prepare For Ups and Downs
If you feel lonely or lost at any point, it’s normal. If something happens that changes your plans, like if you get sick or have problems with your relationships, accept it and come up with a new plan. Think positively and talk to other people about your concerns.
4. Control Your Spending!
One of the best things you can do to make sure you don’t run out of money in retirement is to plan ahead. This is especially important during the first years of retirement.
If you look at your retirement portfolio and see that there is enough money to cover the next 20-30 years, you may be tempted to spend it all now. However, if you do this, you will not have any money left for later.
You may see retirement as a time to relax and not work, but you don’t want to spend your money at vacation levels.
Retirees’ health and personal insurance costs can skyrocket very rapidly. Protect your savings by adding a medi-gap insurance plan to your standard Medicare coverage.
If you’re not a millionaire, then you’ll need to manage your money the same way you always have. Make sure that you spend within your means.
Although retiring doesn’t magically change things, it becomes more important than ever in many ways.
5. Make Time for Family
Do you remember when your children were young?
Do you sometimes wish you had more time with them now?
There usually isn’t much time for fun when you have kids and you have to work.
If you retire soon, you will have a lot more free time than you did before. You can’t go back and change the amount of time you had earlier in life, but you can try to spend more time with family in the future.
This is especially important if you have grandchildren. Just as was the case with your own children, your grandchildren will be young for just a few years. Enjoy this time with them, now that you don’t have to worry about work.
6. Don’t Get Burned on Taxes
If you are like many retirees, most of the money that you saved for retirement was merely tax-deferred, and not tax free This means that when you withdraw the funds from your retirement account, you will have to pay taxes on that income. You’ll have to manage those withdrawals in a way that will minimize your income tax liability.
It will be especially important early in your retirement life to not withdraw too much from your retirement plan if you continue to earn from active income sources. This will enable you to continue to defer taxes on your retirement savings until after you are no longer receiving the additional income.
Though this may sound strange, many retirees who have a lot of money actually have a higher income in retirement than they did during their working years. This is often the case when people have income from multiple sources.
Even though you may not have a single source of income that equals your salary from when you were working, a combination of several sources of income may exceed it. Therefore, even after you retire, taxes may still be a concern.
7. Consider a Part-time Job to Stay Active
Even though you don’t need the extra income, it may be beneficial to hold a part-time job. This will help to keep your mind sharp and also help you to stay socially involved.
Earning a living is not only a financial activity, but also a social one. Work provides us with a sense of purpose and keeps us connected to other people. Many of our friends during our working years are also our co-workers, and this does not have to change during retirement.
If you’re in your early or mid-sixties when you retire, you still have a lot of life left to live. Make sure you fill that time with things that are purposeful and make you socially involved, like a part-time job.
8. Eat well
You should try to eat regular meals, especially if you used to just snack while you were working. Now that you have more time, you should try cooking healthier meals.
9. Exercise Your Mind
Keeping your mind sharp as you age has been shown by government studies to help people stay independent, so use your free time to push yourself mentally, whether it’s learning an instrument or language or earning a qualification.
10. Don’t Forget About Long-term Care Insurance
This is something that most of us don’t want to think about when it comes to retirement, but it’s becoming more likely that we will need some form of long-term care as we live longer.
This means that it is usually best to buy insurance early in life, when you are healthy, as this is when it will be least expensive. This will allow you to buy a policy with better benefits.
11. Have Your Estate Planning in Order
You can no longer avoid estate planning if you have significant retirement assets or a lot of equity in your real estate. This is necessary to ensure a smooth transition of your assets to your loved ones when you die.
While a will does not guarantee that your estate will be distributed as you wish, planning ahead can provide peace of mind and additional resources in case they are needed.
You can manage your estate’s income taxes by taking out a life insurance policy to cover the taxes. This will ensure that your loved ones will receive the full benefit of your estate.
12. Keep Physically Active
We should all aim to do at least 150 minutes of moderate-intensity physical activity a week, so build up to this if you haven’t made exercise a normal part of your life previously. Why not sign up for a charity event to give you a goal to work towards?
13. Seek Social Support
After retirement, many people feel a sense of loss from not having work in their lives. To fill this void, retirees should consider joining clubs and groups. Doing this will help to create a new social life for retirees.
14. Have a Good Financial Advisor
While you may be less interested in your retirement portfolio as you approach retirement, a good financial advisor can be worth their fees many times over.
It can be beneficial to have someone who is not emotionally attached to your finances take a look at your situation and offer strategies for improvement. With the financial world becoming increasingly complex, it is wise to consult with a professional who can help you navigate through it.
You may find that you have less patience or comprehension as you get older, so it’s best to develop a strong relationship with a competent financial advisor early in your retirement life.
Investing a portion of your assets in an annuity can provide safety from stock market fluctuations. If you’re worried about the stock market, investing a portion of your assets in an annuity can give you peace of mind. Annuities are insurance products that can offer stability and guarantee payments for a set period of time. When the stock market is down, your annuity will be there to provide a safety net.
There’s a bit of a pickle retirees face when it comes to investing, especially in the current investment market. The interest on fixed income investments isn’t high enough to provide a steady cash flow. And even though the stock market has been doing well for a few years now, investing in it is riskier than fixed income investments. For that reason, you might want to consider having some of your money in an annuity.
Not all annuities are beneficial, but the right ones can act as insurance to both generate steady income and protect your investment principal. For example, you can have money in an annuity to provide you with a lifetime income, but it won’t decrease in value significantly every time the stock market falls.
15. Go For A Health Check
The NHS Health Check program is designed to help prevent heart disease, stroke, diabetes, kidney disease, and certain types of dementia. Now is the perfect time to get your free midlife MOT.
Everyone between the ages of 40 and 74 who does not have pre-existing conditions or risk factors will be given a checkup every 5 years to assess their risk for age-related illnesses. They will also be given support and advice to help manage or reduce their risk.
16. Make Out a Bucket List
Since most of us have goals and plans that we want to achieve throughout our lives, work often gets in the way and forces us to delay accomplishing them. However, once you retire, work is no longer an issue and you finally have the time to do all of those things you wanted to do all your life but never had the time for.
Making a bucket list is important so that you can have a list of things that you want to do. You want to commit this to writing for two reasons:
When you write something down, it becomes more important, and you’re more likely to accomplish it.
The tool will help you to identify which goals are most important to you and to focus on achieving them.
One of the more pleasurable activities for a retiree is taking advantage of opportunities early on.
17. Keep In Touch With Your Friends From Work
Even though you are retiring, there is no reason to lose contact with the friends you made at work. You could set up regular meetings with them. Alternatively, you might use some of your free time to reconnect with old friends you have not seen in a long time.
If you like party planning, get everyone together for a fun garden or dinner party, anniversary celebration, or other special occasion. You could also raise money for your life-saving work through “Give in Celebration” funds.
18. Don’t Abandon Your Emergency Fund!
An emergency fund is an important savings tool for unexpected expenses, whether you are working or retired.
If you take money out of a qualified retirement plan, you will have to pay taxes on it. This means that if you use your retirement savings for your emergency fund, your taxes will go up. Having a well-stocked emergency fund can help you avoid having to use your tax-sheltered plans for unexpected expenses.
19. Travel More
I’ve always wanted to go on an around-the-world cruise, a wine-tasting trip through Italy, or a simple camping expedition in the Welsh valleys. Now I can finally make those long-held plans a reality, depending on my health and budget limitations.
If you can’t take long trips, mini breaks may be a good alternative. Or you could try going to new places for day trips.
20. Never Stop Learning!
A part-time job is not the only way to stay active. Learning can also help keep you active. The world is much bigger than we have time for during our work lives. We miss out on so much by working. But once we retire, we will have the time and attention to learn all kinds of things we never could before.
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