Not all early retirements are happy events. Individuals forced into early retirement due to a layoff, or for health reasons, do so unwillingly and usually unhappily. Very few workers forded into early retirement are prepared.
Here are the steps you need to take, both financial and emotional, if you have been forced into early retirement. Let’s tackle the emotional aspects of a forced early retirement first. Not only will it help you personally, but it will also make tackling the financial aspects of a forced early retirement, easier to deal with as well.
Step 1. Acceptance
Because so many of us identify ourselves with our careers, what we do is who we are, the emotions surrounding a layoff and forced early retirement can be overwhelming. In many ways, dealing with the death of your career caused by a forced early retirement,is similar to dealing with your own death.
You may be going through the 5 Stages of Grief. Developed by Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, the 5 stages of grief a dying person experiences are; denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and finally acceptance.
Depending on which stage of grief over the death of your career you are in, you may be saying to yourself things like “This can’t be happening”, “Why me, it’s not fair?”, “I’ll do whatever it takes, and take whatever pay I’m given, for a job in my career”, “I feel so sad and lost without a job.” And finally. “It is what it is, no point in fighting it, let’s see how to make the best out of my forced early retirement.”
If you are grieving over the death of your career, you need to speed-up the grieving process, and achieve acceptance as soon as possible. You may be dangerously burning through your retirement savings as you grieve over your forced early retirement.
To help you achieve acceptance and get over the loss of your career, skip the career counselor, and instead seek a psychological counselor familiar with the 5 Stages of Grief. Whether or not, you are experiencing career loss grief, and hopefully you are not, everyone who is forced into early retirement needs to calculate how much they can safely spend.
Step 2. Calculate How Much You Can Safely Spend
After a forced early retirement, the first thing you need to do, is, calculate how much you can safely spend in retirement.
Our Free Early Retirement Calculator estimates the amount you can safely spend each month in retirement. Our Free Retirement Software more accurately calculates how much you can spend and gives you a 30 Year Retirement Spending Plan.
After trying our Free Early Retirement Calculator, you may discover, that the amount you can safely spend in retirement, is much less than your income was when you were working.
Although it may come as a shock, you need to realize and understand that, you control how much you spend in retirement. You have the freedom to create your own retirement spending budget.
Read How to Retire Early to learn how you control your spending in retirement.
Step 3. Create a Safe Retirement Spending Budget
Using Free Early Retirement Software, which contains retirement budgeting and expense tracking tools, create your safe retirement budget.
The sooner you get on a safe retirement spending budget after a forced early retirement, the less you will deplete your retirement savings, and the greater your retirement income will be over the long run.
Read How to Create a Retirement Budget
A forced early retirement does not have to be an unhappy event. Some of you will seize upon the opportunity your forced early retirement presents, as an opportunity to re-invent and redefine yourself, to begin enjoying your new life of financial freedom. Here are the tools:
Free Retirement Tools:
Free Retirement Calculator
Free Retirement Software
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