The value of attending a Pre-retirement
Course
If you are approaching retirement you should
seriously consider attending a
Pre-retirement course. Such courses can be enormously valuable in
helping you make the most of your retirement.
We can and do all retire
(assuming we are lucky enough to reach the magic age – the alternative is,
of course, much worse!) but not everyone makes the most of this stage of
their life. We can drift into an ‘OK’ retirement and see out the rest of our
life quite adequately, but how much better it is if we can plan it so it’s
more than ‘OK’ and becomes a really positive, fulfilling and enjoyable
experience.
There are a range of such pre-retirement
courses from the purely financial, often run by IFAs to promote their
services, to the lifestyle focused courses. It is the latter that we would
recommend, where finance is covered but the majority of time is spent on the
various lifestyle aspects.
What a pre-retirement
course offers (as long as it is lifestyle focused) is the opportunity to
think about and start planning your own retirement so that it becomes a
great time for you and those close to you. The emphasis should be on you as
an individual, rather than studying retirement in an abstract way.
The latest figures show that women who reach
the age of 60 should live for just over 25 years, whilst men who live to 60
should live a fraction under another 25. So you will probably have about a
quarter of a century to go; it would be a shame to just drift into it
without thinking about it and planning it so that you make the most of this
final phase of life.
Above all, we should be able to enjoy retirement. In order to do so to the
maximum and take full advantage of all the opportunities that there are in
retirement, we need to do four things:
• Make the most of our money
• Keep fit and healthy physically
• Keep fit mentally
• Maintain or increase our social contacts
In addition, many people choose to do some form of work in retirement,
either voluntary or paid, full or part time. There are many reasons for
this, financial ones not being the most common. Work can form an important
part of retirement for many people, who find it gives them something
fulfilling in their later years.
A good pre-retirement course looks at all these and other aspects of
retirement so that you will then be in a position to do your own planning,
get a balance in your retirement and make it as fulfilling as possible
taking into account any constraints there might be for you as an individual.
The workshop is just one step, but potentially a very important one, in the
transition between work and retirement so that you can look forward with
confidence and enthusiasm to the rest of your life. We have a good chance of
being retired for about 10,000 days. It’s worth one day to see how we can
make the most of those 10,000.
You can see details of Pre-retirement Courses
run by Laterlife Learning (the leading supplier of Open pre-retirement
workshops in the UK) either in the
pre-retirement courses section of the
www.laterlife.com site or on the dedicated
www.retirement-courses.co.uk
site
or if you prefer to plan your retirement online
then visit
www.planningmyretirement.co.uk
