Money and Time

Some retired people will tell you that they are having the best time of their life.  These people are thrilled to be retired and you can see this by the look on their faces and in how they carry themselves.  Energy radiates from these individuals and they are a joy to be around.

Some retired people will tell you that they are having the worst time of their life.  These people would give anything not to be retired.

How is it possible to have two groups of people feel so differently about the same time period of their life?  

The easy answer is that those people with money are the ones who are thrilled to be retired.  And yet, over the course of my financial planning career, I met with a lot of retired people who were financially very well-off and these people rarely gave the impression that they were having the best time of their life.  They weren’t unhappy but their lives were pretty ordinary.

No, money is only a resource.  It may allow you to do things, it may give you peace of mind, but at the end of the day, money by itself cannot buy happiness or guarantee a fabulous retirement.  There must be another answer as to why we have retired people on the opposite ends of the happiness spectrum.

For many people, retirement is viewed as a transition point in life where the stress of the work world is left behind and the life of leisure begins.  It is the time of life where you do whatever you want, whenever you want, because you have the time.

So, is “having time” the key to a fabulous retirement?  You, like I, may know retired people who appear to have nothing but time on their hands and yet these people don’t seem to be having the best time of their life either. 

No, time, like money, is only a resource.  It may allow you to do things and it may allow you to do things at a more relaxed pace but, again, the existence of time in itself will not guarantee happiness or a fabulous retirement.  There must be another answer as to why some people are thrilled to be retired while others are not.

So, what is the answer as to why some retired people are thrilled while others are not?

For me, the answer is in knowing how to use these resources.  You can have all the money in the world and you can have all the time in the world but unless you know what you want from your life in retirement, these resources will do you little good.

It all begins with you.  What do you really want from your retirement?