Think again about Retirement

This week there are general strikes in France because the government wants to increase the retirement age from 60 years to 62 years. Just about the whole country is on strike over a mere two years!

What this indicates is not just how the population feels about two more years of work before retirement, but how much people in France look forward to a time of switching off and not having responsibilities.

How misguided they are!

Retirement which was conceived as a time of secure “winding down” and a reward for a long working life, has become, instead a time of worry and of concern. Savings are no longer safe in supposedly secure investment accounts, and health issues and their costs are major worries for many people considering retirement. Not only in France.

So retirees are increasingly looking to some form of continued work and additional income after retirement. The problem is that searching to find a “job” when retired is an uphill struggle. Many people cannot even find meaningful work while young and ambitious, let alone when they are no longer seen as energetic and able to contribute fully. Building a Portfolio of meaningful income streams well before retirement would seem to be a logical approach to managing these risks. Instead of pursuing a hard-to-find single job, looking for contract work or servicing clients with the skills you already have is more sensible. Take the leap of being self-employed, and building a client base is what many people will be doing in the future.

See “Even the Rich are Nervous about Retirement” on Newsweek here.

Putting the idea of a portfolio life to work

We are programmed to be given instructions…

And because of this, the notion of finding one’s own opportunities for employment is difficult for many people. Yes, we like the idea of a portfolio life and it makes good sense, but the self reliance required is hard to harness. For many years people have been socialized with the idea that a job happens in a specific place where there is a chain of command and a boss who will tell you what to do. Your responsibilities are contained in a job description. Now, as someone who has embraced a portfolio life you have to give yourself the instructions and create the sense of place within which to operate. Self employment in the framework of a portfolio life requires the initiative and the drive to do a good deal of own desk research and investigation to uncover opportunities. It also requires energetic networking.

It’s good that technology has come to the rescue…

An idea portfolio vs a portfolio life

A portfolio life should not be confused with having many things on the boil at once.

One of they key attributes of an effective portfolio life is that the various activities in the portfolio are fruitful ones that bring a healthy balance of fulfillment and income.

One of the key themes promoted by Scott Belsky (on http://the99percent.com) is that having great ideas is great, unless you are entertaining so many that you never follow through on any of them. This is a catch-22 that often prevents personal projects from taking off, reaffirming dependence on a single 9 to 5 job.

A portfolio life must be sustainable. For this you need a balance of work streams that will provide enough income and enough fulfillment.

Look at your portfolio and see what you need for balance. Is the priority independent income or fulfillment?

Then pick your best ideas in that line, back them and pursue them. Be selective. Don’t let other ideas or gratuitous idea generation stall your momentum.

The great benefits of volunteering

The crisis in South African hospitals and schools due to the nationwide strike by civil servants has had the positive benefit of stimulating a surge in volunteering. While babies requiring intensive care and old people in need of constant medical supervision have been abandoned by the people who should be caring for them, many South Africans have been roused to volunteering in state hospitals. As this year’s matriculants are having to miss the Preliminary exams because of teachers who have walked out on them, offers from volunteers have staved off a total collapse of the educational system. Classes have been held in people’s homes, sports clubs, church halls and anywhere else that the matriculants and volunteer teachers could gather.

This spirit of giving time and skill to those in need, is the essence of volunteering. Not only does it serve the community, but volunteers usually say that the experience did more for them than for the people they intended to help. Perhaps the spontaneous reaction from volunteers in response to the South African strike will expand the spirit of volunteering in the country and provide much needed skills in areas such as schools, day care centres for children, old age homes and many other charitable institutions.

If we are to live sustainable lives and not allow ourselves to waste, we should also be making the best use of our energy and time. Many of us simply indulge in the personal gratification of entertainment and keeping busy with unproductive nonsense. A conscious decision to use time in the most constructive manner will increase the desire for active engagement in helping people and being of value to the community. The new trend in tourism is to take people to where they can have real experiences in the community and not just be passive visitors to the regular tourism sights.
Volunteering in another country has become a smart way to travel in a more constructive manner.

Volunteering is also a very good antidote to passive and boring retirement. Many retirees these days are in good health and are able to use their resources to make a contribution.

People who have portfolio lives are ideally placed to do serious volunteering and to make a difference.

Here's more on the benfits of volunteering: http://www.worldvolunteerweb.org/resources/how-to-guides/volunteer/doc/benefits-of-volunteering.html

Creating a low information diet: less email

An essential enabler for a portfolio life is time. How does one fit more activites in the same amount of time without simply working silly? Efficiency.

Our lives are full of time fillers, things that we just do that don't necessarily create value for us to our addlife quality. Our work lives can be especially inefficient. working in a traditional office environment, think of the time one can spend on admin and office protocols required for you to simply do your primary work.

You cant necessarily change the way an office works, but you can change your information diet.

Technology has brought information into every facet of our lives. There's just so much out there to tune into. If you take it all in you can kiss your day goodbye. Its very easy now to live a reactive life. I know in my experience, I can spend hours a day simply responding to emails... and getting little real work done

Going on a low information diet is not about isolating yourself from the world, its about cutting the fat and being information efficient.

Tim Ferris, author of The 4 Hour Workweek promotes the concepts of lifestyle design and low information diets. One of the key tricks he offers for this is checking your email twice a day and no more. Depending on what you do, responding within a day to a mail is mostly acceptable. So why do we check our mail twenty times a day or have pop up inbox notifications that disrupt our workflow and take us back to being reactive?

Ferris suggestes using an auto reponder like when you go on holiday to let people know that you check your mail twice a day, once at 10:00 and again at 16:00, and that they should call you for anything more urget.

Here is a tutorial on his blog for a low information email diet.