Life after retirement. Having been made redundant, life is looking good.
Posted on by Debbie

Retirement Voices | Add your story to this important new book

I have just completed an easy questionnaire on the subject of retirement. I found out about this project from another midlife blogger and decided to add my voice to the story. If you are a woman and you’re retired I highly recommend you join up and share your story and thoughts, it’s for a good cause and may help someone else out down the track. Here’s the link: Retirement Voices

UPDATE: 5/5/19 Submissions to Voices from the Other Side…of Retirement closed on April 30, 2019. We’re thrilled to announce that 282 retired women submitted questionnaires, which means that we have sufficient content to proceed with the book!

Retirement Voices – the project

Leslie and Roxanne are compiling a book about the other side of retirement, asking for the thoughts of women who have been, there done that and lived to tell the tale 🙂

They would like as many submissions as possible and the closing date is 30 April 2019, so time is getting away! If you’re interested don’t put it off too long. The questionnaire only took me about 20-30 minutes to do, once I’d given some thought to my responses. You do have to register, which is easy to do, and you can save your answers along the way until you’re finished and then hit the submit button. Once submitted you can’t go back and edit anything. I enjoyed documenting my thoughts and hope it will be useful.

“I wasn’t prepared for what retirement would really be like.”

https://retirementvoices.com/

The questionnaire

The questions asked were interesting and thought provoking but not too difficult that I was put off from answering them. As they say, you can write as little or as much as you’d like, there’s no right or wrong answer. They are looking for the feelings we encountered before and after retirement, advice that might or might not have been useful to us, how we spend our time, how we have managed our relationships, among other things.

Here’s a snippet from their website to explain the project:

We’re creating a book entitled Voices from the Other Side…of Retirement. It will be a guide for soon-to-be-retiring women, with advice, lessons learned and stories from women who’ve already left the working world—a powerful and relevant compilation of “in-her-own-words” responses on various aspects of retirement.

Specifically, we’re asking you to share the emotional, physical, spiritual, relationship, and daily-living joys and challenges that retirement can pose. What it looks and feels like at various stages, what you’ve learned, and what you wish you’d known when you stepped away from working.

Why this approach? Because while a lot has been written about planning financially for retirement, no one prepares us for how the transition really feels. And because we believe there’s nothing quite as valuable and relevant as real-world insights and advice from women who’ve been through it.

Women like you.

Whether you were self-employed or worked in the corporate, nonprofit, government or educational world; whether you were a doctor, nurse, engineer, teacher, senior executive, waitress, lawyer, administrative assistant, supervisor, accountant, salesperson, social worker, writer, business owner, pilot, flight attendant—whatever your work was, we want to hear from you.

My story

As you may well know, I had a torrid entry into retirement, being made redundant after a 22year career working as a Senior Correctional Education Officer, just before Christmas in 2016. My role was the Manager of the Education unit within a men’s correctional centre (or prison), supervising teachers and visiting professionals, as well as inmates, communicating with custodial and industrial staff within the centre. I was part of the Management Team and dealt with all levels of departmental staff. I was also an award winning Educator. But that meant nothing to those making the cost cutting decisions!

Farewell cake
Farewell cake

When I had to give up my rewarding role at age 56, after fighting it on all levels for six months, I went into a slump and later realised I’d been grieving.

‘You aren’t redundant — your job is redundant. You are still a much-loved, important, powerful and precious mother, husband, father, wife, person’.

https://debs-world.com/2016/11/04/on-being-made-redundant/

I’m happy to say that all is good now and I am relishing my newfound creativity, freedom from toxic environments and people, time to do what I want, when I want and I manage to fill my days very easily. I transformed into a midlife blogger, although I had been blogging before retirement, I was able to take it to a whole new level.

Surprisingly she found there was a life after retirement and so she started living the life she’d imagined.

What’s next?

If you are retired, you’ve undoubtedly learned a great deal about navigating the transition from the working world to this next chapter of your life. Lessons that you probably had to learn on your own.

Are you willing to share that knowledge with women who haven’t yet made this change so that they can be better prepared?

https://retirementvoices.com/

I do hope you’re able to be involved in this project, if it is something that interests you, then go for it! I thoroughly enjoyed thinking back and giving my thoughts.

Remember the closing date is fast approaching – 30 April 2019!

What do you think of this idea for a book to help women transition into retirement? It’s a different way of looking at it, as most information about retiring is of a financial nature, but this is more personal and insightful way of looking at this change in our circumstances. I wish them well on their project.

All the best to Leslie and Roxanne! Thanks for this opportunity to share our thoughts and advice.

Deb 🙂

Life after retirement. Having been made redundant, life is looking good.

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28 Replies to “Retirement Voices | Add your story to this important new book”

  3. Terrific to share this project with your readers, Deb. You are the poster child for a healthy retirement. I’m in early stages but getting the hang of it. I completed the survey and can’t wait to read the book! Roxanne and I are having lunch together later this week and I’m anxious to get an update on how the project is progressing.

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    1. Oh wow, how good to hear you’re meeting up with Roxanne 🙂 I think it was your blog where I heard about the book in the first place. Thanks for your comment about me being the poster child for retirement, I really love that!!! You’re going well and it just gets better. Looking forward to the book too.

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  6. I looked at the questionnaire a little while ago Deb and realized that I don’t think I’ve officially identified as “retired” yet – it’s like I’m currently “gainfully unemployed” (my new term that I’m thinking of patenting!) When they’re ready for the second edition I might have the answers to all those questions. I’m busy learning from you and some of the others in our tribe, how to navigate this weird “between time” and I’ll probably have several more blog posts in me to write about it!
    Thanks for linking up with us at MLSTL and I’ve shared on my SM 🙂

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    1. I like gainfully unemployed, it’s a very fitting term! I’ve learnt so much from others along the way and you may not be retired just yet but you have so much to offer. You are so insightful I’m sure you’d have enough to fill a book on your own 🙂 Thanks for sharing for #mlstl

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  7. What a great book this will be on so many levels. Retirement Voices hits just the right note as the title with me because it suggests an across the board view of retirement rather than that of psychologists or professionals dealing with retirement issues. Can’t wait to read it. #MLSTL and Shared on SM

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  10. Thank you, ladies, for your comments about our Retirement Voices project. If you haven’t yet done so, we hope you’ll add your voice by completing our questionnaire! Estelle, you make an important point that we often don’t know what retirement really feels like until we get there–which is precisely why we’re asking retired women to share their real-life experience. No ivory tower stuff here!

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  13. Thank you Deb for drawing my attention to “Retirement Voices”. Retirement, in many ways, has been very different to what I expected. From my perspective, I don’t think you can really know how retirement will be for you until you are actually retired. We had prepared for retirement, yet many of our retirement plans went out the window. And that was a good thing. I believe you have to be “there” (retired) to know how you will respond. Yet, I also believe it helps for people to prepare themselves, to have a plan. I know this helped me feel confident about retiring.

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