Retirement II Post Retirement - Sunny Ways

Post Retirement - Sunny Ways

Just finished listening to a part of the local Noon Show on CBC about retirement and it got me to thinking again about my writing on my experience. I had been thinking about doing so for some time. Readers of this blog might remember that I had written in August of last year on "Pre-retirement Blues" but I have not written on the subject since.

As for my title - apologies to Wilfred Laurier, who first popularized the phrase, and Justin Trudeau, who borrowed it towards the end of his recent election campaign. It just came to mind when I sat down to write and thought about a title, as that is a phrase we have heard a few times since October 2015, and it works for me so far.

Now, let me begin by making clear I am talking about voluntary retirement. I think that is an important distinction to be made at the outset as involuntary retirement can be, I imagine, an altogether different 'kettle of fish.' I am not going to write about that further here though, as it is not my experience. This is not to say that I have not had acquaintance with this phenomenon from others I have known and who have been my patients back a few years when I did see adults.

Let me backtrack a little to some issues that need to be dealt with before retirement. One of the most obvious ones that might come to mind is financial, particularly financial readiness. My wife and I have definitely not lived the most frugal of lifestyles by any means, but neither have we been extravagant or really at any time lived beyond our means. I think the background for that in her case was the traditional Chinese cultural value of saving. This was not dissimilar to my own experience as a child of parents and grandparents who had gone through the Great Depression that hit Canada in the 1930s. It prompted my father to seriously talk to us about saving, and even tithing, the religious giving practice, when our parents first decided to give us a serious allowance when I was already 14. From that point forward, I kept scrupulous records of my income and expenditures until after we had been married long enough for me to realize that my wife could do a better job even than I in terms of helping us make sure we live within our means, both from a moral and bookkeeping point of view. She became my "office manager," and has continued to be the person in our household who helps keep and organize the records both for our personal tax and other purposes as well as for the corporation that we had for the last 10 years here in BC and the private practice I had in Manitoba before that.

We began our savings and investment in earnest within the first three or four years of my career, when I was still in my 30s and we were just beginning our family. Apart from some forays into other investment funds, some of which we still have, some - well, one at least - of which were rather disastrous, particularly the one instance of a Multi Unit Residential Holding investment in Calgary in the 1980s, we have entrusted our funds to our Canadian Medical Association financial arm. As a young investor, reading publications like Financial Times, it was always gratifying to see that it performed very well.  We have been very happy with both of the service and the results over the last 30+ years. This applies to both our portfolios in mutual funds and RRSPS. I highly recommend this approach to my medical colleagues. Naturally, there were times when we winced as we saw the paper numbers drop sometimes by tens of thousands. However, saving for retirement is a long-term process and the drops are generally followed by restoration. A key strategy also, unless you are a real risk-taker, is to gradually switch your investments to so-called safer funds as you approach your retirement. This means the returns are generally lower, but the possibilities of great fluctuations and with that, losses, are also less. One certainly doesn't want to arrive at retirement when your funds have just suffered because the market has undergone a significant downturn.

So, we were certainly prepared for retirement from a financial perspective. If anything, my wife and I wanting to enjoy our retirement years together, that knowledge added to the ledger side in favor of retirement sooner rather than later. However, for me, there was another ethical side to this.

As I may have mentioned earlier, in other writings, I had intended to retire two years ago, when I was already 67 years old. However, even before that occurred, it was already apparent that no one was going to come and take my place. My Department Head and Medical Team Leader really wanted me to stay on. I proposed coming back two days a week to the team that had less medical coverage. However, these two individuals really felt that the other team also needed help and so I ended up coming back 1.5 days to the team I had identified and one day to the other team. I really did not feel I wanted to retire and leave our teams with less than adequate medical coverage.

This brings me to another aspect of retirement that is often discussed - do you do it abruptly or gradually? I would have to say that for me, looking forward to retirement, as much as I enjoyed my work, got satisfaction and good pay from it, and worked with good teams, I wanted to retire and so began to "test the waters." Two years earlier, when I was 65, I had cut my working week down to four days. At the same time, I had asked our Department Head about the policy for being "on call" at that age. When I discovered it was an option, after “paying those dues” for nearly 40 years, it was a no-brainer. I quit being on call. Then, as just discussed in the paragraph above, I took a further step in the pathway of gradual retirement by going from four days a week to 2.5 days weekly when I agreed to postpone my retirement. Technically, my stopping work in June 2013 was regarded as retirement and my coming back to work towards the end of September, after a long nice break, further testing the waters of retirement, was regarded as a locum, from which I could withdraw at any time.

I might also have written elsewhere about the spiritual side to my retirement. I refer here to the fact that I felt I had really had a spiritual or religious calling to medicine. I therefore then also wondered if I should not receive a similar signal with respect to retirement. Now, those who are familiar with these things will understand that sometimes these messages seem to come, as it were, out of the blue. At other times, we accept that we hear the divine voice leading us through a series of events or changes.

In my case, in the end, and I don't believe I was just reading things this way to justify a desire to retire, I believe it was the latter situation. I had already downsized my work involvement and that seemed to be going well. Then, a few months before I did take retirement at the end of December, 2015, word came that someone had been found who would take my place on the Child and Adolescent Mental Health teams in Richmond. I took that as a second motion of affirmation to proceed. As I stated above, if one wanted to include that as a third, we were already financially ready. Fourthly, the timing coincided with when a number of my longer term patients, whom I had gotten to know quite well, practically becoming friends with some of them, were, as is said in the field, "aging out." This meant that they, turning 19, would no longer be eligible for the services I offered within the program constraints of our team, and would be turning to the adult equivalents for follow-up if necessary. If they were leaving, it seemed like a good time for me to go.

One other component that was addressed on that noon show today was where your spouse might be act with their thoughts about when you retire. Of course, in many instances nowadays, there might be two partners in a marriage whose retirements need to be considered. According to the guest on the show who had done some surveying and research and then written a book about retirement, many couples never talked with each other about their dreams and plans. That was not the case for my wife and myself. The whole issue was made somewhat easier by the fact that she did not have a career outside the home other than whatever business might have ensued from looking after our personal and corporate financial affairs.

Another factor that has a bearing on retirement is one's health. As the saying often goes, without good health, you have nothing, or at least possibly a lot less to look forward to. Here too, I have been fortunate in that I have no major issues that had a significant bearing on retirement planning or thoughts about what I would do after. I have never been one to consistently be physically active, particularly not aerobically, in my adult years. I was certainly active and did considerable physical work as a child and young man. I did play soccer, volleyball, softball, some cross-country and even downhill skiing and curling. In my last secondary school year and through much of my college years and into medicine I did quite keep up with the Canadian military exercise program called 5BX. I have done things like jogging and exercising for periods of time at various intervals. In more recent years, the latter was often more necessitated by some physical complaints that surfaced and needed to be dealt with. Both my wife and I continue to walk actively and I did as much of this to and from work as I could as well, like as not carrying a backpack with 10 pounds of paperwork in it, a necessity for me of working in two offices. So, one needs to look at one's health and certainly assess where it is at and try and optimize it as one approaches retirement.

I think the final element, and in many cases the most important issue in considering retirement, is what one is going to replace one's career with. Here is where many with remaining financial liabilities choose to work part-time or at some other job. Others who do not want to stop "working" for various reasons also find different types of employment. Of course, there might be volunteering possibilities related to one's career or even in other areas that one might want to pursue but never really had the opportunity to when working. Finally, of course, there might be interests, passions and hobbies that one may have not been able to give the time to when carrying out one's vocation that one would have wanted to, but that one looks forward to getting into more after retirement. In many cases, this whole last area is the biggest stumbling block for a happy and successful retirement. There are too many individuals who have made their careers/work such a key component of their lives that they have nothing else to turn to when they retire. Therefore, it follows that a key component of retirement planning is looking at what other interests a person might have that one might wish to pursue after retirement if it is not going to be work of another kind, and not all volunteering. Again, for myself, this has not been a big issue. That no doubt also stems in part from the fact that I did not go into my career until beginning training for it eight years after post-secondary school. By that time I had already pursued some of the interests that I would have to say I had been gifted with to the point where I never wanted to entirely give them up. I also always looked forward to when I would be able to put more time and effort into them again. This all brings us back to the issue of balance in life, about which much has been written. The obvious message with that is that this is something that again needs to be looked at, preferably throughout one's career, but particularly as one nears retirement.

So, for me, some five weeks after my retirement, I have no regrets. There has only been one moment when I thought to myself, what do I do next? That was really a momentary mood, as there is always something to do, so far. Now, without external pressure, it all boils down to self-discipline. However, at least for me at this point, there is sometimes also still a considerable tug towards a number of pursuits that I just want to do. In that I am fortunate and for that I am most thankful. Indeed, contentment and thankfulness are other important variables at this time of life, which indeed they are throughout all of life.