Preparing Emotionally for Retirement…Don’t let it take you by surprise!
Jason 0 Comments Retire Wealthy Retirement Planning Tips for Retiree's
preparing for retirement is a major life transition and tackling the emotional side of this can trigger a wide range of feelings from excitement and anticipation to anxiety and uncertainty and these wide ranges of emotions are impacted by how retirement lands with you for example was it your idea to retire or were you forced out are you retiring early or later in life is your spouse or partner retired already or still at home and you're entering their domain all of these issues really impact how you show up in retirement but really regardless of how you got here you're here and the question is are you emotionally prepared for this transition so as Jody said it's a major life transition this whole idea of retirement and it Alters your sense of self it Alters your purpose and it really changes your daily activities you were used to going to work every day and now things are different so why are so many people entering this phase of Life emotionally unprepared because well we're going to show you what you need to do to get prepared but we have a client um let's call him Billy Billy's a good name right a good alias he was an entrepreneur for 25 years during high school he went to work for a restaurant and after about five or seven years he bought it from the owner and he ran that thing for a very long time and he had a great identity and a great business but about 20 years ago he sold it right and then he and what was interesting is he sold it about 20 years ago so maybe sold it at around 50.
Yeah and entered politics and worked in the state legislator created a whole new identity for himself a whole new community a whole new set of Knowledge and Skills that really propelled him for another 20 years yeah it was great but then he retired three years ago he has his full pension he's financially secure but he got he started to get in a little bit of trouble first of all his only hobby was golf and he lives in the Northeast where golf is not 12 months a year maybe but then he lost his wife which was really sad and all of a sudden now all of his dreams of retirement have changed so he's a solo retiree and he's not really taken the best care of himself physically and he's really having a tough time building new community outside of his golf right and that's when he came to us and we found a real pivotable turning point for him where he could go through some great self-discovery and transition yet again in his life and he went through our seven day challenge I think we'll put the link below so that you can have that and if you haven't taken the seven day retirement challenge even if you're 30 years old you should take it because there's really good stuff in there it's easy and it's free so we got him to go through the seven day challenge and start talking to us about it then he took our full your retirement game plan course and he started getting his life back on track which was really encouraging and there was some work on his part to do it but now he has a whole new outlook on his health both his physical and mental he's building tremendous great new quality communities of people and he's actually volunteering for several organizations that gives him a lot of fulfillment community and and more but he was totally unprepared for this change and maybe you are too so let's get in how to better prepare men before we do anything let's just address money because it's always the first thing on everyone's mind we don't do anything with money but I know it can't spend it you spend it my day too much sometimes I know it can create unwanted Stress and Anxiety and you know the fact is that many people underestimate their expenses and the stress that money has on their emotions as they're entering retirement yeah and the other thing that people might do and you really can't tell because the stock market is just crazy but some people or many people overestimate their investment income returns so that can put you in some emotional state too so really being better prepared financially is critical and that's not what we do here but but check that box you know so that you can live this phase with a little less stress work with your accountant or your financial planner to get a budget in place and you also you want to be able to work with them so that you can make some smart financial decisions like a good withdrawal strategy integrating with Social Security 401K maybe downsizing is something you should consider doing maybe you need to do it to cut your costs a little bit that's another whole level of stress and there's we have um search our YouTube channel for downsizing it's actually our most popular video if you're thinking about it but this is going to give you a clear Financial picture and this is so critical to a successful retirement like Jody said that just take away a lot of the stress so check the box on your financial picture and move that aside right so let's talk about some other big impact to your emotional preparedness in retirement the number one thing that we come up with the number one thing that we research the number one thing that our clients talk to us about is this idea of loss of identity and people really struggle with this you know coupled with the loss of purpose this is a big impact on your emotional preparedness well it is if your identity has always been tied into your title which a lot of people do in their office and your expense account your status in the community your status in the company if you were the CEO or if you're a doctor or a fireman or a lawyer or an accountant that's your identity and when you step away from your job that goes away and you know this happened to us and more than likely it will happen to you too it leads down a long journey of rediscovery in retirement and we'll leave a link below for the video on this topic which I think it would be really helpful now money and lost identity can have major impacts on you emotionally as you enter retirement but you also need to think about losing your community and ending up feeling socially isolated social isolation leaves many people unprepared for retirement and it's a huge health risk that again if you search our YouTube channel for social isolation and there's some great videos we put together on that you know when you walk away from your career there's a good chance that many of your key relationships won't follow you you know there are younger people they're still working they're still engaged they still have the purpose and the identity and you know they may have been situational relationships based on your employee employment you know they were your work family maybe not necessarily your close personal friends however you may bring some along with you you may you may but this loss of community catches so many people unprepared and surprised and you're gonna need to put real effort into creating a new community it does not happen on its own so let's share some tips on how to be better prepared emotionally as you transition into retirement and if you're in retirement a year two or three or five these things are going to work for you as well so the first thing you want to do is visualize your retirement and when we say that you know what does it look like what does it feel like what is your um what else what is your daily daily routine you know what habits or activities do you want to do do you want to put in your schedule and you know the big question is who is in your life yeah and who's important and positive in your life how about this where are you going to live right you know what are your dreams for what we call the five pillars of retirement what are your dreams for your physical wellness your mental Wellness your relationships your spouse partner relationship is ours good today so far so good so good and then wisdom sharing that the thing is dream a little bit and have a vision for this so that you can put some activities in place to get you to that vision and really getting to this vision is just yourself those basic questions that we just went through the next thing you'll want to do is to make a plan you know keep it simple at first include your financial goals and your lifestyle goals and definitely your health and wellness goals yeah the Five Pillars the vision the idea is to get to the vision you want to put a plan in place so that you get some things done and your plan is not one and done think about it retirement can last 30 years or more you don't spend 10 minutes putting a plan together right for a 30-year time in your life don't skip this part or you really could find yourself wandering a bit like a ruddlest ship lost at sea how's that that was very interesting yeah ship lost at sea you don't want to be that so after you visualize and make a plan it's critically important to stay connected right stay connected to your your family to your friends and to those past work colleagues that will come with you you know um we talked about the colleagues that stay behind and lose interest in your relationship it's really behooven upon us to go back to those work friends and reconnect and we've done that and also we've put effort into finding new friends and new relationships you need to dedicate time to this you do and you have to be intentional about it you know I just saw a really interesting quote a couple weeks ago in the paper by Jane Fonda about being intentional about your friendships it was very interesting you know being emotionally prepared for retirement includes this big one as well you have to address your fears what fears are you having and how are you going to tackle them one at a time head on you might even want to talk to a therapist you know and you also need a good we talk about this all the time because we don't do financial planning you need a good financial planner or wealth manager and you want to develop clear strategies to address all of these fears the big the first thing is to figure out what the fears are and then deal with them one at a time right and the final thing you can do is to practice self-care taking good care of your physical and emotional health exercising regularly eating healthy finding stress reducing activities to take care of you is important to be emotionally prepared you know we all spend a good portion of Our Lives thinking about retirement probably from when we leave college or high school and enter our career all we do is we save money we yearn for the freedom we get excited about what could be in store for us but many people don't prepare as much as they should for this transition to make it smooth fun exciting and fulfilling spend the time getting yourself prepared now if you like this video and we hope that you did this next one what's your identity once you retire we're going to walk you through the three phases of identity when you retire letting go of the old identity the neutral zone and finally putting some effort into discovering what your new identity is going to be and then we're going to give you three steps you can Implement right away so watch this next video
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