Enjoy your latter years

YOU have worked for 30 or 40 years, and now it’s finally your turn to decide how to spend your days. What are you going to do with all that time? Here are some ways for retirees to find happiness in retirement: One key to a happy retirement is not just filling your time, but doing things that are meaningful to you. Many people spent a lifetime at a job that provided an income to support themselves and their families, but did not provide a sense of fulfilment and real satisfaction.

Retirement is an opportunity to create a life that more closely reflects who you really are, whether it’s starting a homebased business, learning how to paint, playing in a rock band or writing the history of your family.

Retirement advice often focuses on the importance of staying productive, keeping busy and somehow chalking up more achievements to put on your lifetime resume.

But many people feel that they’ve been doing that for 40 years, and now they just want to kick back and enjoy life. If you can’t relax and enjoy yourself in retirement, then when are you going to do it? What’s the point of retiring if all you’re going to do is get up early, rush off someplace you might not want to go and then stumble home at night tired, exhausted and stressed out?

For some people retirement is their chance, at last, to sit around the kitchen table and read the newspaper, and then lie around in their backyard and watch the clouds drift by. And there’s nothing wrong with that.