Here’s an excerpt from the book ‘Safe 4 Retirement: The 4 Keys to a Safe Retirement‘ in an early section on the Fourth Key: Staying Involved! -
“You’re in the homestretch when you’re in retirement. This doesn’t mean the finish line is near. Au contraire, with the time you can now spend looking after yourself you can actually extend your life in retirement. What I mean is that you have all that experience and life-learning behind you that now, more than ever, you can use to develop and pursue what directly appeals to you.
You’ll always have other issues banging on your door. Your spouse and family, politics, the weather, and the ebb and flow of your finances will always be factors. But the core of who you are and what you’ve always wanted your life to be can now be realized. I can’t emphasis this benefit of retirement enough.
If you’re bored, remember that boredom usually comes from the inside, not the outside. It just means you haven’t come into contact with your dreams yet. Or your dreams, like mine (okay, is being captain of the Starship Enterprise really that unrealistic?), don’t fit within the world we live in and you haven’t figured out how to work around that. But there are always ways to work in what interests you. You may need to be creative with your time or how you go about it, but at this stage in life you certainly have the tools to figure it out. The secret is to make your dreams a priority. Make being true to yourself the highest priority and you’re well on your way to a happy, Safe Retirement.”
Within this Fourth Key are the following chapters:
Fourth Key: Staying Involved!
Chapter 23: The Best Is Yet to Be
Chapter 24: Choosing to Work
Chapter 25: Volunteering and Loving It!
Chapter 26: Using Social Media
Chapter 27: Being Senior and Single
Chapter 28: Being a Caregiver
Another excerpt from an early part of this section:
“The opportunities that exist for you now, within your Safe Retirement, are the ones you’ve been building toward all your life. In an unfettered manner, you can now grow like never before, following your passions within a solid framework that will provide you with financial, physical, and mental stability for as long as possible.
I recently met an elderly gentleman named Joe. From the outside, based on the initial course of our conversation, it appeared he’d been whipped by life. He’d lost the battle and the Great God Zap had won.
Joe was legally blind, using only minimal peripheral vision to get by; had been widowed twice; and had just turned 85. It made me sad just thinking about how rough things must be for this kind man. However, as the conversation progressed, I learned Joe hadn’t let life drag him along by the tail after all. He had an active social life and golfed three times a week (his friends simply pointed him in the right direction and made sure they wore white shoes to help him line up his putts), he lived in two homes (one in Canada, the other in beautiful Tucson, Arizona), and had just moved in with his new girlfriend, a zippy 80 year old.
Joe embodies the Safe Retirement this book is about. No matter what life threw at him, he kept on working at it. He kept on smiling, meeting new people, honing that golf swing, and even managed to find love yet again after over eight decades into the journey. Joe knows how to tee it up and hit it straight and long down the fairway.”
