For years and years I dreamed of early retirement and spent hours on the computer feeding in facts and figures to arrive at a magical figure that would signal the end of a nine to five job with all its stress and dramas. When I had achieved that figure I made the momentous decision to quit my job and join the ranks of the self funded retirees.

For months I lived like I was on extended leave .Time allowed me to cater for every dream I had whilst employed. Wake up at nine am in the morning after staying up all night watching sport on TV , no problem. Go play golf any day , no problem. After three months I began to think it was time to go back to work, big problem. There was no work to go back to. I began to panic . Suddenly my retirement dream was turning into a nightmare. I had too much time on my hands. Sleeping in , staying up late watching TV and playing golf for the rest of my life seemed more like a gaol sentence than freedom to do as I could choose.

Lack of planning was my biggest mistake. I had vague ideas of how to fill in my time in retirement but did not have anything in place . I intended take up playing lawn bowls. I intended to buy a caravan and travel. I intended to do all the jobs around the house. In short I had all these intentions but gone were the excuses not to do something . Somehow inertia had set in .

So I had to sit down and work out what I should have done and I have come up with the following which may be of some assistance to anyone contemplating retirement.

My first tip would be to have a routine in place prior to retirement that will absorb your time. Find a sport or activity that you enjoy and revel in the fact that you can choose any day to play once you are retired. Allocate one or two days of the week to that.

My second tip is that you have in place some sort of work that you can perform part time once you retire. The skills you have acquired during full time work will seem enjoyable if you are under no pressure and can pick and choose where and when you work. If you do not want to find paid part time work then there are numerous places where volunteers are desperately needed. Allocate three days of the week to that.

My third tip is that you list all the things that need to be done to the house and spend one day a week doing them . There must be hundreds of small jobs that you have been putting off doing for some reason of rather . Now you have no excuse not to do them but do them at your pace and not all at once.

My fourth tip is to allocate one day a week to do something out of the ordinary. Go and spend a day at a library or museum. Go for a drive somewhere and spend a night away from home. Take your wife out to dinner and hang the expense.You can afford it. Indulge yourself. Buy her flowers. That could well be out of the ordinary.

I could go on but what I do want to stress is that you must replace the work routine that you had in place for numerous years with a routine in retirement. Money should not be a problem if you have sort out proper advice prior to taking retirement.

What you will find is that you now have what will seem like an extraordinary amount of time on your hands.Without proper planning prior to retirement time can seem like a vast ocean to cross with you in a tiny boat and no instructions of what port to sail to let alone how to start the motor.

Learn more about this author, Barry Williams.
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