Yes, Retirement Is Great. However …

Isn’t retirement great? I get asked that all the time, and I also find myself asking that same question to others quite often. Honestly, we are quite lucky to be where we are. I hope at this point in your lives, everyone is enjoying their retirement as much as possible.

Retirement comes with challenges, beginning with actually learning how to be retired. For most of us, we spent 30-plus years in a world of constant challenges. Our heads on a swivel. Planning and pre-planning and counter-planning and waiting for shoes to drop and trying to plan for any scenario. To have all that planning and always being ready to respond, and always looking for the bad guy in the room. To just turn off all of that is super difficult. I talked to a lot of people who have struggled going into retirement because it’s such a drastic change. I get that. It takes a while.

I’ve been talking to active members every few months as we host seminars at PPOA to help members prepare for retirement. We have all the players involved, including the retirement experts at LACERA, others to help navigate the workers’ compensation system maze, the deferred compensation group, a couple attorneys and even a mental health expert. We usually fill the room. I normally ask the group to ponder these questions:

• Do you think you’re ready for retirement? 
• Do you have something else to do, do you have a hobby? 
• Have you tried a staycation for a couple weeks to see how it feels to not be attached?

These are questions I think active members should be asking themselves years before they actually retire. Because it’s a learned thing.

I love hearing the stories from retirees about what they are doing, how they’re spending time with family, stories about grandchildren, stories about travels and stories about their new lives, mostly in different states. But there are also retirees out there who are having trouble adjusting. They are struggling with the fact there’s been such a drastic lifestyle change in retirement after 30 to 40 years of the head-on-a-swivel routine. The difficulty in adjusting to retirement is real, and I think maybe the silent danger to our physical and mental health.

With that, I will ask all of you, as retirees, to reach out to friends who are newly retired and make sure they are adjusting well. Give them your advice. Provide support. Don’t assume everything is hunky dory. Invite them to luncheons and try to stay connected if that’s what they want to do. I think it’s important to be there for our brothers and sisters even after we leave the job and hang up the saddle. And once again, you need to remind them to schedule colonoscopies, skin checks and any other medical procedures that they’re likely putting off, even the annual physical. I’m telling you: that stuff keeps us alive.

The only real business I have this month is to remind all of you that PPOA is transitioning to electronic voting. So far, a couple hundred PPOA retirees have registered for electronic voting, but thousands of you have not. Please pay attention to the communication from PPOA and be sure to register so you can cast ballots online. In addition to elections, this platform may also be used in the future to conduct polls and solicit input and opinions from members.

With the thousands of collective years of experience of PPOA retirees, this Association would be wise to tap into that wealth of knowledge. Many of the issues the Department is facing today have been faced in the past, and many of you have gone through different iterations of these problems.

I get emails all the time asking about the state of the Department and staffing and hiring, and even negotiations and salaries and benefits. I feel if we were ever to put together a group of the best of the best, like an all-star group to guide the Department forward, many of the players on that team would be retirees who look at things differently with more experience and more history. 

The impossible task would be dragging you all away from your fishing rods or your grandchildren or your fireplaces or your books or bringing you back from your vacations in Africa or the Yucatan.

Life isn’t like a movie where the retired hero hears the helicopter land in front of their house to retrieve them to return to work to save the world. So I guess you all just get to continue enjoying retirement, and maybe that’s a good thing.

Until next time, I hope you really are making the best of things, and I wish you all a healthy and happy life.