Category: Adjusting to retirement

Is Your Retirement Fulfilling … or Just Busy?

If you ask many retired people what their life is like, they will probably tell you that they are as busy as ever. Every day is full of errands, shopping, household chores, yard work, TV and movies, club meetings, and all sorts of other things. Their calendars are filled with events, appointments, and get-togethers. After…
Read more

The New Normal: Time for a Retirement Reset

As of April 19, about 40% of the people in the United States have received at least one vaccine shot and many of us in the older age brackets have received both. The pandemic isn’t over by any means, and it will continue to be a factor in our lives for many months to come,…
Read more

To Achieve Your Ideal Retirement, Are You Willing to Change?

It’s easy to imagine an ideal retirement lifestyle, filled with stress-free days in which you are engaging in all those self-fulfilling pursuits you’ve always dreamed of but never had time for. You probably have a nice list of things you would like to do and places you want to go after you retire. Maybe you…
Read more

Why You Still Need Time Management after You Retire

After you retire, you may believe that you no longer need to manage your time. Perhaps you regard time management as something you get to leave behind when you end your working career. After all, you have been a slave to your work schedule for decades. If you are not retired yet, you may envision…
Read more

10 Ways to Stay Young-at-Heart after You Retire

While you have some control over the physical aging process with a healthy diet and moderate exercise, the fact that your body ages as you get older is inevitable. However, you have much greater control over your attitude towards aging. Here are ten steps you can take to cultivate a positive, youthful attitude at any…
Read more

Your Retirement is a Journey, Not a Destination

Throughout your working years, you have probably viewed your retirement as a destination. It is a goal you are saving for and will hopefully reach one day. But once you reach this destination, then what? The perception of retirement as a destination may be why some people approach retirement with dread rather than anticipation. They…
Read more

10 Truths About Retirement

I’ve been retired for over seven years now. The newness and shininess of retirement has worn off, and I’m now well-settled into this chapter of my life. Work has receded into a distant memory. Has retirement turned out the way I thought it would? No. Has retirement turned out well anyway? Yes! Over the past…
Read more

How to Survive and Thrive as a Single Person in Retirement

How to Survive and Thrive as a Single Person in Retirement

Are you single? If so, you probably have some concerns about your retirement that people with partners are less likely to experience. If you’re married (or otherwise partnered), don’t click away! Consider that, unless you and your spouse pass away at the same time, one of you will experience being single at some point. Later in…
Read more

8 Conversations Every Couple Needs to Have

Hopefully, you have at least a general idea of how you hope your life will unfold in the years to come. You probably have some ideas (whether vague or specific) about where you’d really like to live, where you hope to travel, when you hope to retire, and an assortment of dreams and “bucket list”…
Read more

50 Things You Can Do During the Pandemic

The most popular article on RetireFabulously.com has been the mega-list of 100 Things You Can Do After You Retire. After all, there’s no reason to be bored after you retire. Unfortunately, during the COVID-19 pandemic, some of those activities aren’t feasible because they involve interacting with groups of people in potentially unsafe situations. But don’t…
Read more

“I’m Afraid to Retire.”

In the years that I have been writing and speaking about retirement lifestyles, I’ve had the opportunity to chat with and exchange emails with many people about their hopes and concerns as they anticipate their retirement. During one such exchange a few months ago, a reader told me, “I’m afraid to retire.” I suspect this…
Read more

How to Successfully Retire if You Have a Type A Personality

You probably know some people who have Type A personalities. They are driven, goal-oriented,  rigid, competitive, and edgy. They thrive on being over-committed and they like to take charge. They’re perfectionists who have low tolerance for incompetence. Type A people thrive in a fast-paced, demanding work environment. While these qualities may be desirable for career…
Read more

What’s Your Retirement Personality Type?

Retirement is not one-size-fits-all. There are many ways to envision how you’ll spend your retirement years. Identifying your retirement personality type can help you gain clarity about what you want your retirement to be like on a day-to-day basis. You might see yourself in more than one of these categories, and the categories you fit…
Read more

7 Ways to Prevent Loneliness After You Retire

When you retire from work, you retire from pressure, stress, deadlines, performance reviews, boring meetings, and that annoying guy down the aisle who spends all day making personal phone calls that everyone can hear. But you will also leave behind something that is more important than you may realize: human contact. While most of your colleagues probably aren’t…
Read more

12 Reasons You’ll Love Being Retired

Hopefully, you are looking forward to retirement with eagerness and anticipation. You envision retirement as a well-deserved reward that you have earned with years of hard work. You are imagining all sorts of ways to fill your days once you are free from the constraints of work and your life is truly your own. But…
Read more

7 Tips for Thriving as a Mixed-Retirement Couple

It’s not uncommon for two-career couples to retire at different times. This may happen when there is a significant age difference or if one spouse retires sooner than planned due to an unexpected layoff or an irresistible early retirement incentive package. In other cases, one spouse may feel burnt out and ready to throw in…
Read more

10 Tips to Help Your Marriage Survive Retirement

While you may view retirement as a long-anticipated emancipation from the work world, it is also a period of considerable change and adjustment. If you are married, some of the most profound changes will take place within the context of your relationship with your spouse. For some couples, the fact that they have been drifting…
Read more

Experienced Retirees Share Valuable Advice for a Better Retirement

The internet is awash with advice from retirement planning experts. Interestingly, many people who write retirement advice haven’t retired yet or are relatively recent retirees (like me). Plus, much of the advice you read comes from financial planners. That’s important, of course, but as you know, there’s more to a happy retirement than simply saving…
Read more

What Will Your First Year of Retirement Be Like?

You have probably been anticipating your retirement for many years. Perhaps you’ve entertained some general ideas about what your retirement will look like, but you’re not sure what your day-to-day life will be like once the big day comes to pass. Despite your years of anticipation, you may be surprised by what it’s really like…
Read more

Will You Be Happy After You Retire?

At first, this may seem like a rhetorical question. After all, you won’t have to work anymore! You will no longer have to deal with pressure, deadlines, performance reviews, demanding customers, or annoying co-workers. You can shut off the alarm clock and get up when you want. And best of all, no more boss! (Well,…
Read more

Congratulations! You’re Retired! … Now What?

It’s not news to anyone that the people in the Baby Boomer generation (those born between 1946 and 1964) are leaving the workforce and entering their retirement years in larger numbers than ever before. An estimated 10,000 people turn 65 in the United States every day. Among my circle of friends and former co-workers, I…
Read more

To Enjoy a Happy Retirement, What Are You Willing to Let Go Of?

In many of the other articles on this website, I write a lot about all the possibilities for what you can do with your life once you no longer have to work (or at least, work full-time). You can spend more time doing things you’re passionate about, such as writing, playing music, creating art, or…
Read more

4 Questions You Need to Answer to Enjoy a Rewarding Retirement

“Where do you see yourself in five or ten years?” You’ve probably heard this question many times during job interviews throughout your career – especially from interviewers who weren’t very skillful at conducting job interviews. One of the biggest problems with this question is that you have no way of knowing what opportunities may be…
Read more

An Amazingly Simple Secret to Greater Happiness, Health and Longevity

Would you like to slow down your rate of physical decline by as much as 62%? Want to be able to reduce or delay the risk of cognitive decline? The answer is not some new miracle drug.  I’m not even talking about exercising regularly and eating responsibility – although those habits are certainly important and…
Read more

8 Surprising Ways that Retiring Can Stress You Out – And How to Conquer Them

When you think about what your retirement lifestyle will be like, what comes to mind? What adjectives would you use to describe what you hope your life will be like? I’ll bet one that’s high on your list is “stress-free.” Like practically everyone else, I’m sure you hope that your retirement years will be more…
Read more

7 Things I’ve Learned During the First 9 Months of Retirement

I have been retired for nine months now.  In some ways, it seems as though the time has flown by.  In other ways, it seems like my life has been like this for a long time and work is now a distant memory. When greeted by friends, I’m often asked, “So how’s retirement?”  My stock…
Read more