Are You Ready?
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Do you go back to work?
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Do you start your own business using skills gleaned from years of experience?
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Do you look for good causes and donate your time as a volunteer?
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Do you nurture new skills or old interests and pursue them as a business or hobby?
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Do you get more serious about leisure interests, including travel and recreation?
Our Search Engine Optimization (SEO) expert, who is all about analyzing such things, reports that people all over the world each month are ardently searching for the following: “what to do in retirement” and “what to do after retirement.” In fact, these are the top two retirement-related exact phrasings in global monthly keyword searches. Also notable on the search list are “retired and bored what can I do” and “retired now what.” This indicates that many retirees have already entered, or are on the threshold of entering, the so-called afterlife of a career, and they don’t really have a game plan for the rest of their lives.
The danger is that retirement often lacks something a working life demands— a purpose and resolve on how to thrive over a span of decades.
Are You Ready?
Living to today’s traditional retirement age was such a rarity throughout human history that the idea of living off a pension after working 30 or 40 years seemed implausible, even unimaginable. The average life expectancy of men and women in the United States was no more than 47 and 49 years, respectively, in 1900, according to National Vital Statistics Reports. It wasn’t until 1940 that the average lifespan of the American white male reached 62.
We’re now living well into our seventies on average and a growing army of both men and women are retiring early. The average length of retirement as of February 2018 was 18 years, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, and that means there are plenty out there enjoying retirements of 20 years and well beyond.
