WHERE WILL YOU LIVE LATER IN LIFE?

Thinking that where you will want to spend your retirement years will be a decision that just sort of unfolds after you’ve settled into a relaxed lifestyle? And isn’t that “relaxed lifestyle” just what you’ve worked all these years to be sure that you will have? Well here is some thought fodder for you on the “where to live later in life” issue:

Certainly where you live has always played a significant role in many aspects of your life. However, in the later part of your life, where you live will figure critically in the essential quality of the life you have. If you need to move from the community where you have spent much of your life raising your family, and working, then it is probably beneficial to make that choice while you are still mobile and able to reach out and make new friends and acquaintances. Having the energy to be part of a new community is important to most of us, and it is especially difficult for those of us who do not get out and about as much as we used to do. Then to, as we no longer have jobs or children in school, or are surrounded by family members or long time friends, there is not much reason to be out and about.

Do you know anything about alternative living situations for retired people? Have you thought about what would best suit your personality in terms of a living situation other than your own home? What is your financial situation, and what could you afford to pay for another living situation? Have you discussed various possibilities and alternatives with your family and friends? These questions and others need to be considered when you think about retirement living.

Most of us would say that when we retire we would want a home base near family members, if at all possible. Choosing to live in the same area as other family members might be for you a first choice, but it may also not be a real possibility in your situation. Even if you do live near family, you want to be realistic about how much time you will actually be able to spend with them on a daily basis, and you need to think about what other people you will have available to interact with frequently.

For the average person, living in a community with people in similar circumstances is frequently the most comfortable choice for all sorts of reasons. Where you can find this situation takes some serious thinking and investigating, and one of the options you can consider is living in a retirement community of some kind. Certainly this choice fulfills all kinds of needs for a retired person.

Having spent seven years working in a retirement community, in a position that put me in face to face contact with a wide variety of residents over the years, I discovered a surprising fact about many of these people: Very many residents that I met told me their move into a retirement community, which was for them a far more socially active situation, was about ten years later than would have been optimum for them. And why was this so? Well, because like most of us, they saw retirement communities as places your family put you when you got to be real old. And most were quick to add, “if I had only known how happy I would be here!”

It was unfortunate that these folks found out quite late in life just how much enjoyment is to be had from living in your own comfortable apartment, surrounded by cherished belongings, in a community of friendly people, where there is a multitude of choices about what to do every day. And, of course, one of the choices is to stay in your apartment and relax and read or watch a bit of TV. However, as a retired person, it is essential for most of us to have companionable friends available for such things as chatting over a cup of coffee, sharing interests, or shopping or traveling together whenever we feel like having company. Some of the other perks in many retirement communities are dining facilities for when you don’t want to cook, transportation to a variety of places you may need or want to go, and staff to help clean your apartment, or fix things when they don’t work right, or check on your safety, or call 911 when you need them to do so.

There are several varies of retirement communities, and in thinking about them as possible places for you to reside, you need to consider things such as location, the population mix in the community (the kind of backgrounds and general interests that are shared by the majority of the people in the community), the cost of living in the community, and the services they offer that you may or may not need at this time, but may need in the not distant future.

 

WHAT TO THINK ABOUT IF YOU WANT TO STAY IN YOUR HOME

If you choose to stay in your family home, or even if you downsize and move to a smaller home, be sure you check out some key things with your family. If they reassure you and promise that they will be both present and available to help you when the time comes, then you are a most fortunate person. However, you do need to factor in the fact that families frequently become scattered as job and relationship demands require.

 If you are tempted to skip this conversation, you may be thinking, I have a large family, and at least one or two children who might remain near the family home. Do you honestly want to count on a suppostion as a sure thing? And when thinking about your children being there to help you, you also need to consider the reality that people are living busier and busier lives, and visiting older relatives often becomes an obligation rather than a pleasure, especially if the older relative routinely needs help with all kinds of things.

Here’s another fact you need to look at: Helping an older person with many of the tasks of daily life can become an almost full time occupation, even if the task is shared between at least a couple of people. Making sure the older person has proper nutrition, appropriate medical care and a well kept home is a demanding and taxing undertaking. However, those are only the basic care issues as an old-old person may also need bookkeeping help, and perhaps some financial aid, a decent social life and regular visits from those they care about. As you can easily see, all this takes a lot of time, energy and organization, to say nothing of self sacrifice on the part of the “helpers.”

So what about the idea of hiring someone to help you out if you stay in your own home? That sounds possible if you have a sizable amount of monthly income or plenty of savings. It is not cheap to have in-home help! Check out the average price per hour of hiring someone in your area who is bonded and insured and comes with references. It may well be more than you can afford. Also, do you actually want to spend most of your time with an individual caregiver as opposed to having a variety of people with which to interact? It is usual that relatives and friends will probably not be available to visit you nearly as often as you would wish.

Staying home all alone, or with only a hired caregiver, is not an optimum situation for most of us. There are other options and we need to discuss some of these which we will do in the next blogs. 



WORK, AND WHERE TO LOOK FOR IT LATER IN LIFE

Okay, so you need to keep working either to support yourself adequately, or to supplement your income to make it possible to live the kind of life that you want to have, or because you just want something to do that is interesting. When thinking about what you could do for job at this point in your life, start by considering how much time you realistically can spend at work on a daily or weekly basis.

Do you have health and energy conditions that necessitate a particular kind of daily routine? If you must eat at a particular time each day, or take medications at specific times, or nap, exercise, or go to physical therapy at certain times, what kind of work schedule would best accommodate your needs? Can you fit these routines into a day that includes going to a job full time or part time?

When you think about what kind of work you want to do consider the work you have already done in your life. Is there anything in your work experience that you would now wish to pursue further, or to develop in some way? If you could be a part time worker doing a job you previously had full time, would you like to do that? Can you think of a job type that is related to a field about which you are knowledgeable that might interest you? Or maybe you can think of one that you once thought would be helpful to a position you once held?

Would you want to work doing something that engages skills you already have, or would you like to learn new skills? Have you engaged in learning new skills lately, and how are you at doing so? Is there a part of you that would enjoy doing something different or entirely out of character for you, maybe something that engages you emotionally rather than intellectually?

Have you tried doing some volunteering that you felt was both worthwhile and enriching, and might you now pursue employment in this arena? Perhaps you have managed, or done hands on care, for a relative with a health condition, and think you might do so for others? Maybe you would enjoy being employed by a family with two working parents that require help with childcare? Or possibly you could do bookkeeping part time for a family, or organizing and event planning for a non profit?

Obviously this is a time in which it helps to think creatively, and then to use any connections you might have to realize your goals, or whatever good ideas you come up with. You may have to start kind of slowly to develop something new but if you can do so it may well turn out to be a most exciting endeavor.

CAN I EVER RETIRE?

The first question posed in the last posting was,"when could you reasonably retire?" You’ve had plenty of time to think this over, and I’m guessing that many of you have already come up with the obvious answers, one of which is not soon, if ever.
Very many of the baby boom generation have lived their lives spending all the money they have on hand at any one time, and that involves living from one paycheck to another. And frankly, for most it has been a pretty good life! Unfortunately, this lifestyle has not included saving for the proverbial rainy day or investing for future income. So now what?
As the hints mount up that a person will not usually be able to work on until the day they die, this requires some serious thinking about what else you can do once you cannot continue to work. The first place a person usually looks to for income when they can no longer work is to their social security payments. If you can wait and work until age 70, you get bigger payments from social security, but you probably also collect for a shorter period of time. Whatever, most people find it impossible to live only on income from social security payments. You definitely need some additional source of income besides social security, as the social security program was never meant to be a sole income source.
If you do not have savings or investments to supplement your social security income, and are still healthy enough to work, at least part time, what do you do? Well of course, either you try to continue working part time at a job which you already know how to do, or you look into training for new work. Such training is available in various places, but you need to realize that many programs are aimed at the young who will seek full time jobs or professions. This impacts your ability to participate in the class in the first place, as well as having a learning environment that is appropriate for your purposes.
One way to experiment with possible part time employment is to do some volunteering in the field that interests you. There are tons of volunteer programs available, and your computer can help you find one that fits your needs. You should also consider talking to those who are still working who are a bit older than you are, to find out just how they hooked up with part time work. Here too, your computer will be helpful, as there are blogs and chat rooms and all kinds of sites where this very topic is being discussed. One thing you want to be conscious about in all this is making sure you do not take on jobs that require more than you can or want to do at this point in your life.

So, does all this mean you cannot ever retire?  And the answer is probably not comfortably, unless you win the lottery, or figure out some other way to add to your social security income.  We will be thinking about all that in the next posts. 

                                                      

LET'S TALK RETIRING!

One of the adventures in aging that some of us look forward to, and some of us dread, is retiring. Wait a minute, you say to yourself, when will I seriously have to think about retiring? Surely not yet! I can’t afford to retire anytime soon, and when I do I’m just going to travel and have a bunch of fun, and then worry about problems when they occur. Sounds like a realistic plan, right? Sure, but commonsense tells you that if you had at least a general idea of what most people experience during this stage of life it could help you out. In fact, the average person is best served when they review the available information about post retirement years before they retire, and make some plans based on what they have learned. Oh, I know you’re not average, and that likely you will live independently for a very long time, just like your Uncle Harry who died at 98 while sawing wood. But just in case you aren’t, and you don’t, maybe you should gather a bit of information about what happens to most folks. At least you could then be knowledge about what others will have to experience. And wouldn't it be better, and more fair to the people you care about, to do so before you’re faced with problems created by not thinking ahead?

Okay, so lots of people's first thought on the retirement subject nowadays may well be: I can't afford to retire! And after encountering that depressing thought, it all seems too hard to think about, and we just give up. However, it is extremely valuable to find out just what is possible or likely in this stage of life, even though it could be tough stuff to think about. No, everyone doesn't always retire, but most people do, sooner or later, for one reason or another. So let's start our thinking about retiring by asking ourselves some pertinent questions:

1. When, if ever, can I retire with enough monthly income, or savings, to support myself ?

2. What kind of part time job could I get after I retire?

3. What will happen to me if health problems interfere with my ability to work later in life?

4. Will my family be able to help support or care for me if I need them to do so?

After you think about these questions a bit on your own, then we will discuss some of the thoughts we have come up with and go on from there.

                                                                                                      

                                                        

REVIEWING PATTERNS IN YOUR LIFE

I've noticed both in my own life, as well as in countless numbers of life stories that I've had the privilege to hear, that your life experience to date is a good place to start looking for hints about what will likely come next. It's not that life experiences literally repeat themselves, but that general patterns or themes seem to pop up more often than could be called coincidental.  I think you will agree that it is helpful to see these patterns, and what they mean for each of us, before the next round occurs.

So what kind of patterns are we going to look for, you say?  Well there are those we create for ourselves and those we inherit from our families:  An example of a pattern created by the self could be making statements that alienate other people and end relationships, or counting on other people to actually support us. An example of an inherited pattern could be something like marrying people with serious addiction problems of one kind or another,  or finding that you tend to hook up with people whose handicaps position them to look to you for support. Whatever you find when you start this search be sure you consciously note it, record it, and think about it, and consider what it means for whatever will come next for you. 
                                                        

                                                               

You will find that some really interesting information about yourself can result from answering these questions:

1.  What themes or patterns can you see in your life experiences?

2.  If you had to describe your life's story in just one sentence, what would  it be? 

ASK YOURSELF

Yes, probably old age will be somewhat different for you when you get there than it was when your ideas about it formed, but it is necessary to realize that, and acknowledge the beliefs you currently have about aging. You know about the mind/body connection I'm sure, so think about how important it is to check out just what you believe about aging. 

Our beliefs about aging are heavily influenced by what we've witnessed happening to grandparents and parents and older friends. So let's begin by trying to recall what our parents seemed to believe about getting old,  and what happened to them as they aged.

My Pops lived 20 years longer than my mother, and he lived alone in his own home. I did  ask him what he thought about aging and he said it's good to keep busy, take frequent naps, and enjoy whatever you're doing.  And when the time came that he needed help, he was forthright and honest about it and very appreciative of the help he received. He'd also admit that there were some pretty tough things about the last part of life in terms of physical pain and living with the knowledge that it needed to be over sooner than later.   Everyone agreed he was a sweet and kind person, and definitely a manly man.

Here are a couple of things to ask yourself as you examine your beliefs about aging:

 1.  What things about being old did your parents seem to believe?
 2.  What have all the older people you've known taught you about aging?