When it comes to your retirement, you probably have a natural tendency to focus on the dollars and cents.

Clearly, growing and sustaining your wealth will be hugely important once you stop working. We would hardly disagree given our role as financial planners!

That wealth will  fund your intended lifestyle and give you an invaluable sense of financial security.

Your retirement planning will involve developing and maintaining income and investment strategies. As well as providing you with the means to enjoy your retirement years, these strategies will also need to be robust and flexible enough to deal with the effects of inflation, market turbulence, and wider geopolitical shocks – as well as changes in your own circumstances.

Beyond that, however, planning for your retirement involves a range of other factors, not directly related to your financial assets.

Here are five potential issues you are likely to face in retirement that you should start planning for now.

1. You’ll have a lot of free time to fill

When you are working hard in a full-time job, your time off is incredibly precious. No doubt you look forward to weekends, and structure your holidays in some detail to ensure you are maximising your time away from work.

So it’s inevitable that reaching retirement will create a big upheaval when all your time will be your own.

Rather than consisting of two days, your weekends will effectively last for seven. Likewise, you’ll be able to take a holiday whenever you want, for as long as you desire.

Initially, this will be a novelty that you’ll enjoy, and the initial phase of your retirement may well feel like an extended holiday.

That phase could easily last six months, or a year, but after a while the lack of demarcation between work and leisure time could start to chafe, and you will want to start looking for other challenges.

2. Work will no longer be a defining expression of your identity

As well as a regular income, it’s important not to lose sight of the benefits you get from working.

Your role at work is almost as important as your home life, especially given that during a working week you probably spend as many of your waking hours with your work colleagues as you do with your partner and children.

Stopping working will mean you will lose one of the key drivers of focus in your life. The projects, sales targets, and product launches that have motivated you to get out of bed every morning will no longer be there.

Joe Schmoe, senior accountant, or Jane Schmoe, sales director, will now simply be Joe and Jane, retirees.

So once you leave work and no longer have the regular challenges of employment to fill your days, you’ll need to find new ways of defining yourself.

3. You’ll be faced with potential health issues

An active lifestyle will also help address another potential retirement issue, which is that of your long-term health.

When you’re young and active, you may have taken your health and fitness for granted to an extent. But once you stop working, you will want to ensure that you devote time to this.

You’ll will also need to consider your health and long-term care costs. This will not only mean making sure you have the necessary cover in place – with an eye on the rising costs as you get older – but also setting time aside to deal with the inevitable administration challenges of paying for essential healthcare over the years.

4. You may need to build a new social network

Clearly, it will be dependent on the work you do, but it’s likely that your place of work provides you with ready-made network of people to interact with.

So when you stop working, you may need to start building new relationships.

Such relationships are important from a health and wellbeing perspective. The Grant Study – landmark research carried out over eight decades by Havard University – revealed that strong relationships are the top driver of happiness and good health throughout your life.

Suddenly losing the interaction you enjoy through work, both inside and outside the office, is something you should be aware of, so you can look to build new networks after you retire.

5. You could have a financial responsibility for other family members

The expression “sandwich generation” was first coined in the early 1980s, and describes the cohort of adults who have a responsibility for both their parents and children.

Originally, this responsibility specifically referred to caring needs. However, increased longevity and big advances in medical diagnosis and treatment mean that a growing number of people are entering retirement with financial commitments relating to both their elderly relatives, as well as having children of their own who may need financial support.

If you are in this position, or believe that you are likely to be after you have retired, then this is something to factor into your planning process, both in terms of the financial implications, but also other potential issues such as housing needs.

Your wealth is a means to an end, not an end in itself

As you may have realised from reading this piece, much of your planning for retirement is about more than simply saving and investing enough money to provide you with a comfortable lifestyle.

The transition from full-time employment to a new lifestyle of leisure and free time will be challenging.

Because of that, it will pay dividends to start planning for it now. The sooner you can start this process, and get a high-level plan of what you want to do, the more chance you will have of enjoying a comfortable and fulfilling retirement.

Get in touch

If you are an expat living in the US and would like to talk about your own retirement plans, please get in touch to arrange an exploratory Zoom call to talk through your options.

Please note

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