Transition to retirement

Planning for retirement is very important, or so the experts tell us. If you do a search for planning for retirement you get many results that deal with the financial circumstances of retirement. When I did a search, I found five pages of Google results before I found one page that mentioned planning for life after retirement, not just planning for enough money after retirement.

Retirement is a major life course transition for which some people plan more than others. As planning positively affects the adjustments you have to make when you retire, understanding that planning to have enough money is important, it is not the only thing that is important. When planning you can find a lot of material on how to be financial prepared but there is not much on the activities you can do or plan to do in retirement. A recent study found that retirement activities can be categorized into three types: transformative leisure, bridge employment, and interpersonal leisure.

Moreover, these plans are affected by people’s opportunities, time perception, and partner support for these activities.

Bridge employment is one that many retirees think that they would like to, or must, take on. Bridge employment is meant to help someone make the adjustment to retirement from working. It is a big jump from working 40 plus hours a week to working zero hours a week. So, bridge employment can help. In my circle of friends, we all did some bridge employment. Most of us did this for between six and eight years, before settling into full time retirement. Bridge employment is not for everyone and my research shows that between 30 and 40 percent of us take on bridge employment.

Interpersonal leisure is the time we spend with friends and family. During the last two years this type of leisure has been take away from many of us and we are looking forward to being able to see friends, go out to dinner with friends, or take in a sport activity with friends, to see grandchildren and other members of our family. It is an important aspect of our quality of life.

Transformational leisure is something that very few of us take on. This leisure may mean taking a course, skydiving, completing that degree, volunteering or travelling to places we have on our bucket list. It is, for some a luxury they cannot afford and for others it is a luxury they cannot afford to miss out on.