7 Big Retirement Surprises and What to Do About Them
Retirement is supposed to be that time of life when the sun shines golden, the vacation has no expiration date and the early-bird dinner deals are endless.
All those expectations might come true. Inevitably, though, retirement will spring something unexpected on you.
Some of these surprises are good. Some are not so good. Either way, it’s best to be as ready as you can be for whatever retirement throws at you.
To that end, we asked four authorities who have written books on retirement lifestyle and finance to weigh in on the surprises they hear about most and how to avoid them if you can — or deal with them if you must.
1. Surprise! Leisure gets boring fast
People who retire in a position to bask in leisure 24/7 often discover something they never expected: Leisure can be a yawner.
“Sure, every day is Saturday, but what do you do — mow your lawn every day?” asks Mitch Anthony, a consultant to financial advisers and author of The New Retirementality: Planning Your Life and Living Your Dreams at Any Age You Want.
“When people only have leisure, they find out it’s not so fun anymore,” he says. And once retirees stop having fun, they can get pessimistic and hit a downward spiral.
Anthony cites a retired friend, formerly an engineer at IBM, who played golf every day for five months with four buddies, all also recently retired. They drove each other crazy. Anthony says his friend couldn’t take having “the same conversation over and over with the same results every day.“
Solution: Get a life. Anthony’s buddy soon got a part-time job as a limo driver. He didn’t really need the money, but he needed a purpose beyond hitting the links every day.“
You need a vacation and a vocation,” Anthony says. “The two feed off each other. When you have something meaningful to do every day, it makes the leisure stuff fun.”
2. Surprise! You can’t stop checking your portfolio
It’s one thing to review your 401(k) statement when it shows up in the mail or online. It’s something else entirely to be on your laptop for hours a day, tracking your portfolio’s every microscopic movement.
This is your inner fear of running out of money in retirement rearing its head, Anthony says. Many retirees share this fear, and too much free time only makes it worse. These are the retirees who obsess over the stock ticker on CNBC and endlessly watch the financial news shows.
To learn about other retirement surprises and what to do about them, from AARP, CLICK HERE.