The road through retirement begins

Not another blog about retirement! But this is my personal experience. I retired at the age of 69 just over a year ago. Only now have I started to look at blogs about retirement and I discovered Kathysretirementblog.com which in turn introduced me to Robert Atchley’s Seven stages of retirement. I am usually averse to anything American but I persevered.

The first stage is pre-retirement planning and I now acknowledge I did little of this. I gradually moved from working full-time to four day- and then three day-weeks and I believe this approach is generally recommended. But did I give much thought to post-retirement day? No, I didn’t. As a result, I think I missed the second stage as outlined by Atchley ( the Honeymoon) and found myself in Stage 3: Disillusionment, where the retiree misses the structure of the working day.

Stage 4 is Reorientation. I partly succeeded with this. Apparently, it’s best to give up all contacts with your previous workplace which I failed to do. I maintained contact with several friends from work and I actually took on a contract to do a very small amount of work. However, I did introduce new activities. I signed up to a weekly Pilates class to energise my body and enrolled on an online creative writing course to keep the grey matter working.

Inevitably, I was asked, like many new retirees, to join some committees alongside those I had belonged to when I was still working. I generally agreed and although some of this voluntary work was enjoyable, I soon found myself rather overloaded.

I’d like to think I am not unusual and that other retirees have been caught with the same dilemmas. I’d love to hear from you about your experiences.