If you are planning to retire over the next few years, a new report may give you pause for thought.
Think about the word ‘retirement’ for a moment.
What springs to mind?
Doing things on your terms, holidays to far flung places you’ve always wanted to visit, being able to take up new hobbies or pastimes you didn’t have the time for when you were working and spending time with your grandchildren.
Each of us will have different plans for our retirement, but new research shows that what should be a time to relax, do things on our terms, and take life easy, is far from the reality. In fact, according to research by Prudential, one in five of us who has retired over the past 10 years believe that retirement is more stressful than work.
Worryingly, around one in seven people (13%) said they felt that their health had suffered since giving up work.
The report identified a gender gap too:
- 23% of women said they were more stressed in retirement than when they were at work
- This dropped to 13% among men
The biggest causes of stress in retirement were:
- Missing former work colleagues and the social interaction of work (35%)
- Financial, with a feeling that they had more ‘money in their pocket’ when they were working (29%)
- A feeling that they had lost some of their identity (20%)
- Requests from children for financial assistance (8%)
- Being seen as a source of free childcare (5%)
The importance of planning
While retirement is changing, and more people ease into it, perhaps through working part-time, there’s little doubt that retirement is a massive change in our daily lives.
The focus in the months and years in the lead up to retirement is naturally on getting our financial affairs in order, so that we have a financially secure retirement. However, the research from Prudential shows it’s just as important to think about other aspects of retirement if we are to avoid some of the stresses other people are clearly feeling.
Commenting on the research, Vince Smith-Hughes, a retirement expert at Prudential, said: “Often when we think of retirement planning we concentrate exclusively on our finances, but what these findings show is that there are many other things involved in helping to make us happy in retirement.”
“As we have found, giving up work can be a shock to the system even before people start to come to terms with the inevitable change in their financial circumstances. However, as we see people easing themselves away from the world of work through a period of ‘pretirement’ and more people saving from an earlier age through automatic-enrolment, we hope that the new retirees of the future will be better placed to cope with their changed circumstances.”
“While financial security doesn’t guarantee happiness in retirement, having your finances in shape when you give up work should help you to cope with some of the stresses caused by the change in your daily routine. And for many looking to secure the most comfortable retirement as possible, the best approach is still to save as much as possible into a pension as early as possible in their working lives.”
A happy and contented retirement is clearly possible. The research also showed that while some people are more stressed in retirement, the majority are happy with their decision to finish working. Only 13% are disappointed in how their retirement has turned out.
The financial burden
It is of course easier to deal with the other stresses retirement brings if the financial burden is taken away from you.
That’s where we come in.
We’ll work with you to understand the type of retirement you want, then organise your existing pensions, savings and investments to ensure you can pay for it. That might even mean you can retire sooner than you had previously thought possible.
We won’t leave you high and dry either, we form a long-term relationship with each of our clients, reviewing the plans we have put in place at least once a year to make sure you stay on track.
If you would like to chat to one of our Independent Financial Advisers about your retirement plans, please call us on 0800 612 8099 or complete our online enquiry form by clicking here.