After losing my spouse and hitting my financial goals, I’m retiring this year – how do I make sure I don’t get bored?

A 54-year-old Reddit poster has achieved her financial goals, and she feels like she’s ready to retire. However, while she is excited about the prospect of leaving the corporate world and all its hassles behind, she also has some concerns about what her future is going to look like.

Specifically, she’s not entirely sure how she is going to spend her retirement.

This is a question that everyone should answer before they leave work, because you don’t just need to be financially ready to give up your job — you need to be emotionally ready as well. 

Being financially prepared for retirement is only the first step

The Reddit poster explained in her thread that her retirement investments plus her husband’s life insurance policy will give her $200,000 in income to spend each year, so she is confident that he’s going to be OK with her finances after quitting.

However, since her husband passed away last year and her only child is graduating from college, she’s going to be largely on her own as she navigates what to do in retirement.

While she expects to try to find a partner, as well as to fill her time taking fun classes, studying art and music and language, traveling, joining community groups, and getting more fit, she’s also worried that she won’t feel useful and is afraid she’s going to get bored and fall back into consulting, which she doesn’t want to do at all. 

She is absolutely right to be concerned about how she will spend her time, since studies have shown that retirees can often lose their sense of purpose, become lonelier, and even experience health changes such as cognitive decline if they aren’t gettng enough social interaction and don’t have a clear plan for how to fill their days. So, before she — and others — retire, it’s helpful to have a clear plan. 

Deciding what to do in your retirement years

This poster, and anyone else thinking about retirement, should take a few key steps before officially ending their careers.

First, they’ll want to make sure they are in good financial shape. This can mean talking to a financial advisor to confirm their nest egg is large enough, to decide on a safe withdrawal rate, and to make sure that they have the right asset allocation so they aren’t exposed to more risk than they should be now that they are going to be relying on their investments to support them. 

Next, it’s important to know how you will fill your days so you can maintain social connections, stay healthy, and feel like you are still contributing something useful to the world. The poster here is doing a decent job with this as she’s got some good, including signing up for classes, traveling, and joining groups. 

It can actually be best to make concrete plans to ensure you do these things, though, and don’t just fall into the inertia of wasting your days once there’s no place you have to be. So, for example, the OP and other future retirees may want to actually book travel or join a travel club and become part of those community groups before officially leaving work to make sure they have commitments and that they truly enjoy the activities they had planned. 

This way, there’s a much greater chance of retirement being a happy one, full of things that make life worth living.