Work and Retirement
For as long as man has left any record of his hopes and aspirations he has expressed his desire for a long life. But as people live longer and more and more of them retire from work what is their potential for living a good life? Can the retirement years be as satisfying as the working years? This is the question facing millions of Americans, and it may be the question which prompted you to take part in a retirement preparation program.
There is no easy answer to this important question. As a matter of fact no two people will approach the question in the same manner. For example, some people take a look first of all at some of the practical aspects of retirement and ask themselves such questions as:
How can I make ends meet after I retire?
How can I keep healthy during the later years?
What am I going to do with all the time I’ll have on my hands after I retire?
What to do after retiring?
“Give me the answer to questions like these, said one older person, “and I’ll tell you whether or not I can live the good life after I retire.”
Let us see if a preparation for retirement program can help this and other older persons find answers to important questions such as these.
Making Ends Meet
Most people realize that they will have less money to live on after they retire, and they frequently wonder how they are going to make ends meet. What can be done about it? In a preparation for retirement program older people can be given the opportunity to find out how much income they will have after retirement (income for retirement), how much it will cost them to live after they retire and if it appears the going will be rough, what they can do to cut down on expenses or increase their retirement income. As a matter of fact, cutting down on expenses or increasing income are the only courses of action open to people who are concerned about making ends meet.
Neither course of action is an easy one on this subject about work and retirement. Nevertheless careful consideration can be given to ways to save money, to manage available pension funds efficiently, and, if it is necessary, to earn some money after retirement. Difficult as the problem may appear on first examination, much can be done to strengthen one’s financial position during the retirement years.
Keeping in Good Health
Having enough to live on is almost always an older person’s first concern. His second concern is living in good health. In this instance, also, much can be cone by the older person. First, he can make arrangements to find out about his present physical condition and what needs to be done to improve it. Even more important, he can learn how to prevent poor health from striking him down in the first place.
No one denies that people slow down somewhat as they get older. However, it is no longer true that being old is the same thing as being sick or disabled. Each day that passes brings new drugs, new skills and new understanding so that today’s older person can be a much healthier individual than his parents were when they became older. Indeed, within your lifetime medical science may find the answer to such things as heart disease and cancer which at the present time affect the health of so many older people.
For the present, however, it is probably true that many older people have been subjected to different kinds of disease and injury over the years and too often they have failed to take care of themselves. This doesn’t mean that they have to go through retirement getting progressively worse. Modern medicine is able to arrest certain ailments, improve many of them, and in some cases, bring about a cure.
Good health depends on healthy minds as well as healthy bodies. In fact it is impossible most of the time to separate the two. If people are worried, frustrated, dissatisfied with everything and everybody and with work and retirement, and unable to relax and enjoy life, they usually do not feel very well physically.
Keeping Busy and Useful
The older person can be fairly sure that once he stops working he is going to have a lot more time on his hands. How he uses this time can “make” or “break” his retirement years. If, as sometimes happens when people stop working, they lose touch with their friends, break away from church and other organizations and in general sit around doing nothing, they are almost surely heading for a difficult retirement. This is because idleness and lack of contact with other people breeds the feeling that daily life is meaningless.
Good retirement planning and preparation rather than waiting until after retirement to learn the truth about a sit-down, do-nothing kind of retirement can make the difference between leaving job to retiring to a new and exciting time in life.
These then are a few of the problems which many older people feel they must solve if the retirement years are going to be as good as the working years. The position taken in this program is that the older person is far from helpless in the face of these and other situations which arise as he retires from work and enters the retirement years.