Wake Up and Smell the Coffee

Recently I've been thinking about my retirement and for the first time in my working life, to seriously address my pension provisions. This may seem strange to some, but until now pension has been something that I've put on the back burner, stupidly believing that something would come along to make ends meet. Now as the years pass by at an alarmingly rapid rate I'm not so sure.

In my youth and through my 20's I saw those who I knew retire, and they seemed burned out, old people who were ready to sit back and let others take over. I saw men who seemed to fizzle out before my eyes, the ghost of who they used to be once they stopped working.

Then over the past twenty years or so there has been a retrospective realisation that life expentency has now extended with better health care and healthier lifestyles and the age of retirement for government pensions has been raised. I was one of those unlucky women whose date of birth put me on the losing side on this decision. We have all been given govenment homilies now on ensuring that we have private pensions in place, since hearing about or even worse being victims of various pension schemes that have completely crashed.

The ethos now is one where we are all meant to be considering working for longer hours and more years in order to help build our savings up, but apparently it will also be good for our self esteem. Legislation has also come into force giving people rights to extend their working life into their 70's. In comparison to the rest of the EU we must now be a nation of confident and happy people as we have the least number of national holidays and the highest working hours over the day.

And I have been trying to assimilate all of this and think about how it relates to me. And - I came to the conclusion that retirement is not so much a giving up but a moving on, maybe having the money to do as you please rather than having to do as you are told for your daily crust. Taking a few risks by exploring other avenues that might make money; turning a hobby or enthusiasm into a means of revenue maybe, or taking a back seat in the work place in order to switch off at home and enjoy other activities that are out there to pursue. By trying not to let work define you, believing that it is your total life's achievement. By discovering hidden talents and understanding that life learning does not always have to do with updating workplace skills. By giving yourself to other things rather than the rat race, like watching the garden grow, children play, tasting the food and appreciating many of the good things in life that are often for free anyway.