Your Happiness Portfolio for Retirement

“The key to a successful retirement is feeling in control and having meaningful engagements… Most people need individual as well as group activities, some with high energy and some with low energy.” Gene Cohen, MD, PhD, Psychiatrist and prolific writer Planning for retirement is almost exclusively focused on building a financial portfolio that will support you after you leave your career. If you Google “retirement,” you will get page after page of references for financial planning articles and websites. If you search Amazon for books about retirement, well over 90% of them will be about financial planning. Your financial advisor may ask you some questions about your plans for retirement but they revolve around spending events like moving and traveling and are intended to be sure you budget money to do them. No one tells you that you also need a Happiness Portfolio®. In fact, financial advisors don’t have any idea what a Happiness Portfolio® is and certainly are not trained to help you create one. What is a Happiness Portfolio®? It’s more than your bucket list – although your bucket list items should be part of it. Your Happiness Portfolio® is your plan for how you want to live every aspect of your life so you feel that you are flourishing. What does it mean to you to flourish? Each of us is likely to have a different answer to that question. It is worth spending some time thinking about what flourishing means to you. To me, flourishing is enjoying my life and feeling that I and my life matter in some way. That means filling my days with things I truly enjoy doing. It also means some of those activities are focused on making a difference to others in some way. Nancy Schlossberg, EdD, is a professor emerita at the University of Maryland and an expert in adult transitions. Because of her background, she expected her transition into retirement to be smooth sailing. When it was more challenging than she expected, she did a great deal of research to understand what she and others were going through. In the introduction to her book, Revitalizing Retirement: Reshaping Your Identity, Relationships, and Purpose, she tells about being asked by an interviewer if she had found any surprises as she interviewed people for her book. Her answer was “Yes. Whether I was speaking to men or women, rich or poor, young or old, all expressed a common theme and challenge – the need to be noticed and to feel important, sought after, appreciated, and depended upon by others.” That is what mattering means. We also need to include things that give us a sense that we are growing and not just getting stagnant. We need activities that give us a sense of connectedness, of aliveness, and of anticipation for what tomorrow is bringing. Sadly, most of us don’t do much planning beyond our finances for our life after our careers. Oh, we make our bucket lists and think about where we want to live. But we don’t plan what our days will be like and how we will fill them in meaningful ways. Research tells us that most of us spend more time planning a two-week vacation than we do planning our life after our careers end. Just as Dr. Cohen said above, the happiest retirees are those who fill their lives with a range of activities with a variety of energy levels, and a mix of social involvement. Among the important things that should be in your plan are things that replace the non-financial benefits of your career. These are things we just took for granted when we were working: a sense of identity, social connections, a structure to our lives, and a sense of doing something worthwhile. The value of building a Happiness Portfolio® is that it forces you to think about what kinds of activities you really want to have in each of the eight areas of your life. It encourages you to take some action to make those things actually happen. In Part 3 of this book, we will look at each of the eight areas of your life and rate how satisfied you are with that aspect of your life today. Then, you will describe what it would take to make that area exactly the way you would like it to be – what activities you wish to include or what skills or knowledge you wish to acquire. Lastly, you will write down the action steps you want to take to make that happen. Your Happiness Portfolio® is not a one-time creation. It is an ongoing process of examining what is making you happy and what is giving your life meaning. It is something you should review and update on a regular basis. It’s your roadmap to making your Third Act truly a smash hit!