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Retiring: 'Time to Make the Donuts'

Retirement involves expectations, plans, and perhaps a reinvention

Forget the IRA for a minute.  How’s your portfolio for spending your time after retiring? Here’s a little advice and thoughts explored in this ‘Talk of Iowa’ program:

Make a plan. About a year before the retirement day, decide how you will be spending your time. Have a list of things to do: volunteering, learning a new skill, maintaining friendships and social networks, and develop ideas about how pieces of those goals can be accomplished every day.

Choose a new adventure.  It’s a chance to reinvent or rediscover yourself as your former role is changing. Is there a job you’ve always wanted? Sometimes a part-time job in retirement fills that need.

Reality vs. fantasy.  Know the difference.  It’s easy to picture retirement as one long vacation, but after a few months, that concept can wear thin.  

You've bucked the trend already.  The whole image of what retirement is supposed to be according to Baby Boomers will look completely different than it did with their parents.  And perhaps with each step along the road, that’s what Baby Boomers have always done.  Be creative.

Get baking. Good motivation to get out of bed every day can be propelling. That might mean making regularly scheduled commitments or maybe just having a mantra with a chortle.  As one IPR listener emailed, “there used to be a Dunkin’ Donuts commercial where the baker would get up in the morning and say, ‘Time to make the donuts!’  Somehow by saying this when I get up in the morning it seems to get the day moving; I say it almost every day.”

Retirement can be scary and difficult. But it does not have to be.

Guests for this program are Marian Mathews Clark, author of Sixty-Something and Flying Solo: a Retiree Sorts it Out in Iowa, and Michelle Buhman, Program Specialist at the Iowa City/Johnson County Senior Center.

Charity Nebbe is the host of IPR's Talk of Iowa
Dennis Reese was the mid-day host for Iowa Public Radio