Mike
Carruthers:
When people talk about planning for retirement the discussion
usually revolves around money. As long as you have enough money
socked away retirement will take care of itself.
Miriam Goodman:
Well, it doesn't. And first of all people are often socially
tied to their jobs - their whole social network is people at
work. Well once you're not going to work anymore what do you
do?
Miriam Goodman,
author of the book Reinventing
Retirement, says except for the money part of it her research
shows that people just don't talk about retirement.
Even people who've
been married forty years never had a conversation about "what
is your view of retirement, how do you see us as a couple in
retirement, how do you see twenty, thirty years of our lives
in front of us?"
Often people
wait until they retire to decide what to do and often those
decisions are not well thought out.
A lot of people
say, "Oh well, I think I'll move across country so I can
be closer to my grandchildren." Well it better be a place
that you want to live anyway because if you pick up and move
off to some small town just because your adult children live
there. You're forgetting how busy lives are. And that maybe
your grandchildren at two or three are great but pretty soon
they're going to be five and six and they're going to have after-school
activities and they're not going to have any time for you.
Miriam says in
order for retirement to be a fulfilling part of life, it takes
some planning.
People - they
have these sort of knee-jerk reactions, "So well, retirement
means I must travel, I must move, I must do this" - and
they don't really think what's best for them, and they don't
really talk about it.
At somethingyoushouldknow.net
I'm Mike Carruthers and that's Something You Should Know.
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