Emotional Side of Retirement Planning

Preparing for retirement should include more than financial planning. You have to be emotionally prepared for it as well. Money is no doubt an important issue in retirement - in fact I think the most important one. However, equally important is your psychological preparation - a non-financial plan that suits your personality.

And psychological preparation means knowing about yourself and what fulfills you among other things. It addresses the emotional aspects of retirement - the inevitable psychological adjustment process that must be made. Other things include closely examining your individual personality traits, wants and aspirations. For example: Keeping busy attending to your garden is not enough. Feeling appreciated, important, valued, needed, challenged, connected as well as knowing what is fulfilling for you is important to success in retirement.

Many people became bored, restless or plain frustrated with little or nothing to do while in retirement. Some even went into depression even though they were financially prepared for it. For some, having a fulfilling retirement is about selecting new activities that continue to physically and emotionally fulfill them. They need to think and plan what they are going to do with all those hours that used to be taken up by work.

In my previous posting You Are Not Yet Ready To Retire - So What are Your Options, I wrote "….for some people a sudden transition from a working environment to a non-working life during retirement may pose an emotional burden, which can do more harm than good. This is usually associated with attachment to holding a job for all of one's working life so much so that when one is released from a job, feelings of doubts about one's self worth and capability creep in". This is all due to the loss of identity when one disengages from a career in which one has spent many years and which defined one's identity to a life void of work. For many working people, a job fills the largest percentage of their lifetime, and work colleagues become an important part of their community. When one retires, one loses all of the sources of fulfillment one enjoyed from work. It's normal for a retired person to feel a sense of loss and displacement when a significant portion of his/her identity goes away.

Work gives a sense of purpose that everybody needs. That includes a place to go, peer contacts, responsibilities to discharge and a sense of camaraderie. Once retired, those needs don't go away - we just have to learn to fulfill them through a different set of activities. One way to address this problem is to find new "work", whether paid or unpaid.

So in closing readers, ask yourself what is your life purpose and what excite you and use the answers to guide you to find your preferred activities for your retirement. You may find the answers if you look hard enough within yourself. Planning for retirement means more than just knowing about your financial picture. It's also about knowing yourself and what fulfills you. In short, it is a holistic approach to retirement planning, which if you're fully prepared, will spare you the headache and frustration later in life.

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