Hooray! You have finally made it!
After six and a half decades on this planet, perhaps around 15 – 20 years spent in schooling or college followed by another 40 years of work, the day has finally come when you get your gold watch.
Now what?
Monday morning comes and suddenly you have nowhere to go and nothing to do. OK, you can tidy the garden and wash the car. You might nip down to B & Q and buy some paint and completely redecorate the house. That should keep you busy for a few weeks.
Then what?
If you are like many people you may well not have given any consideration to what you are going to do with all the time you now have on your hands. Certainly, you may have some hobbies, but you can’t really spend seven days a week on the golf course. Well, actually, you can, but you’d soon become very bored with that. Our suggestions for turning those years of retirement – which could be another 30 years or so, since people are living longer – into years of enjoyment.
11 Things To Do In Retirement
1 Get A Job
Huh? I’ve had one of those and I’ve just finished it!
Quite. But you don’t have to get a full-time job unless, of course, you want to. There are plenty of part-time jobs out there that you are perfectly capable of doing that will take two, three, or four days a week, or mornings, or afternoons, which will keep you occupied and what’s more keep you earning some extra money. Sure it may not be quite as much as when you were CEO of that Footsie 100 company, but in the words of Tesco “Every little helps”.
2 Start A Business
You can start a small business. It can be anything that you want to do and you can do it full time or part time as it suits you. After 65 years, you’ve learned a few skills and you can sell those skills to other people. You can have a bricks and mortar business, or you can work online.
There are hundreds of thousands of things that you can do online. For instance, I now spend a good deal of my time writing articles such as this one for which I get paid and I never have to leave home. I can work as and when I choose. You can do the same.
3 Learn To Cook
Your local charity shop or second hand book shop will have a ton of cookbooks, so you can experiment with different recipes that you may never have considered when you were working full time. If you already know how to cook, start with food of a different type, such as Taiwanese, Mexican, Indian, or anything else that takes your fancy. Of course, you can find a lot more recipes of every type by searching on Google.
4 Learn A New Skill
Take a class and learn a new skill. Many universities and colleges offer free or heavily discounted classes for retirees so you could learn to paint, take up archery, learn dressmaking, play guitar – the world is your lobster, as Del-boy says.
5 Learn A New Language
Keep that old grey matter ticking over by learning a foreign language. You can take courses online in just about any language that you can think of. Check on udemy.com.
6 Travel
Now you have learned that new language, go to the country where it is spoken. You can chat away to the natives, and you’ll find that they will tell you about great places to visit and sights to see that are not in the travel guides.
7 Trace Your Ancestry
Learning about your ancestry can be tremendous fun and become a wholly absorbing hobby. With the advent of the internet it is now easy to start creating your family tree and finding out about your predecessors. Websites like ancestry.com can get you started for as little as £10.99 a month – less if you pay for a year in advance.
8 Volunteer
Spend a bit of time volunteering and helping out others for free. It will make you feel great to be giving something back to the community.
9 Join A Town Shed
This one is largely for the men. Camden Town Shed was started in 2011 and is a meeting place for local retirees who can take part in all sorts of hobbies and have access to a wide range of tools, people, and skills in a communal environment where the object is often to produce items that can be sold for charity or contribute to the general welfare of the town. Town Sheds are springing up all over the country. My own town has had one for 18 months and grew so rapidly that it had to move to much larger premises within the first 12 months.
10 Read Your Way Through A Book List
This doesn’t have to cost you a penny, as all the books you need are at your local library. If they are not, your library will get them for you from other libraries anywhere in the country.
11 Write Your Memoirs
Why ever not? You have lived a long life. You have had hardships, adventures, love, heartbreak, and all those facts of life that we all go through at one time or another. You have a story to tell – so tell it!
Those are just some of the many possibilities that are there for you now that you are retired and have so much time on your hands. Don’t spend the next 20 or 30 years sitting in front of the telly. You have the rest of your life to live, so live it.