Is retirement really for for you?

As a society are we too focused on retirement?

As a girl, I often heard my father say that he can't wait until retirement and he planned for it with policies.

But when I started studying Marketing I befriended a lecturer in the engineering department who was close to retirement.

Many of the best conversations I had on campus were with him.  As he spent every day with students, he was still relevant and up to date. One day he announced that he was ready for retirement and his reason was that he was tired of dealing with students.

As I tutored and was on the SRC, I could relate to getting tired of students even though I was one of them.

Yet several months after he retired I bumped into him at a shopping centered. This once vibrant and interesting man kept on fumbling on asking the same questions over and I could see that his memory was not what it was.

I was deeply saddened.

People often don't realize that retirement was invented as simply a way of making more space for younger people to get opportunities.  Yet a person with years of experience has wisdom that they can add to the world.

I see too often that people see retirement as a destination.  While your body may need to slow down a little, the mind can continue to grow given new tasks.

I love Robert Kyosaki's You Tubes  on Money for Millennials. He has so much wisdom to add.  My own uncle was the one that introduced me to skype and whatapp and he is in his 70s.  I love the Bitcoin Granny, who is a retired teacher that I know who decided to start a bitcoin mine.

In the book The 4-Hour Work Week,  Timothy Ferris debunks the retirement myth.  He puts it down to retirement being a wors case scenario.  He says that your retirement planning should be in case you become physically unable to work.  He says that people who look forward to retirement are people who actually hate what they do and can't wait to get out.  If that is the case, then why commit to a lifetime of misery?

Statistically, with inflation, most retirees have to drop their lifestyle by between 30% to 40%.  Go to your grocery list and scratch out 30% of your groceries.  What do you have left?

My sister in law is the most talented artist that I know.  Her work is exquisite.  But she in the last few years developed a condition that dramatically impacts her site.  She started by changing her style but has had to slow down dramatically.  That is the kind of retirement that you need to plan for when your physical ability is reduced.

At a talk that I attended by Allon Raiz from Raizcorp, he said that the most successful first-time entrepreneurs are typically those in retirement age because they have a lifetime of wisdom, contacts and also usually do not have the financial responsibility of young children.

If you are going to commit to something, then commit to designing your life, so that you get to enjoy it now and commit to living on purpose with multiple streams of income that will allow you to keep living the life you want.

Live on purpose.