By Sheryl Smolkin

Whether you are early in your career or counting the months until you retire, all of us are searching for the magic elixir that will allow us to retire well and retire happy. Here are some retirement tips from the blogosphere that may help you on your journey.

On BrighterLife.ca, Dave Dineen says Retirement is the time to focus on your passion. It doesn’t matter what you are interested in whether it’s basket-weaving, skydiving, volunteering, quilting or oil painting. He also suggests that you talk to your financial advisor about reflecting your passions in your retirement plan. Retirement is no time to put off what makes you happy because you are not sure you can afford it.

Retirehappy blogger Jim Yih offers his Ten ideas to a successful and happy retirement. The top two on his list are plan ahead and be conservative in your assumptions.

Bob is retired and lives in Scottsdale, Arizona with his wife of 37 years. His Retirement advice is 7 things you shouldn’t do. For example, he says don’t try to copy your parent’s or your friend’s retirement and don’t count on financial promises and performance to remain unchanged.

Diane explores what she has learned about retirement in the last two years on her blog A new chapter. She says quitting her job, selling the house, leaving friends and moving to a new city 500 miles away has been a lot of change.  Even now it’s a bit lonely living far away from those friends, but she tries to keep in touch. And she continues to work on making new friends.

Several years after Retired Syd retired the first time, she went back to work for two years. Now she is fully retired again. In Cycling through retirement she talks about how important it is not to get into a rut.

She says, “I can’t play piano, or go out every night, or stay home with the TV every night, or travel, or do anything day after day after day.  I need to cycle back and forth between new and old passions.  I need to cycle back and forth between periods of high activity and slower paced ones. Heck, I’ve even cycled between work and retirement in my retirement.”

Do you follow blogs with terrific ideas for saving money that haven’t been mentioned in our weekly “Best from the blogosphere. Share the information with us on http://wp.me/P1YR2T-JR and your name will be entered in a quarterly draw for a gift card.