If you are about to leave work behind and start a new life as a retiree – and haven’t really thought about what your new life will look like, The Retirement Handbook by Ted Heybridge is the book for you.

This book is not about the money side of things. Instead, the focus is on you – ideas about how you can be active, eat well, and enjoy life.

Retirement, Heybridge begins, “is your time to spend as you choose, so it’s up to you to decide how much time you wish to devote to volunteering, meeting friends, exercising, gardening or minding grandchildren.”

Exercising and being active is a key consideration, he writes. “Only one in seven 65-74-year-olds and one in 14 over 75s meet World Health Organization guidelines for recommended physical activity,” he notes. That’s 2.5 hours of “moderate aerobic physical activity per week,” and he encouragingly notes that “any activity, no matter how light, is better than none.”

Cycling, he writes, “gets you out, relieves stress, and makes you feel great.” Sixty-three per cent of Copenhagen residents commute to work or school by bike, he notes, adding that “the health benefits of cycling outweigh the injury risks by 20:1.”

Other great activities listed in the book including dancing, running, yoga, swimming, and getting to the gym.

In the section of the book on healthy eating, Heybridge talks about the importance of hydration. Women should have 2.2 litres of water each day, for men it is 3 litres. “If we forget to keep our fluids up, we become dehydrated, which can lead to fatigue and poor concentration,” he warns.

Other advice in this section includes cutting back on sugar, the many advantages of “plant power” in your diet, and useful strategies for cutting back on alcohol.

While saving for retirement and pension plans aren’t expressly featured in this book, ideas on how to make your retirement dollars go farther are.

The “pain-free ways to save” section suggests growing your own food and flowers, becoming a chef at home to save on restaurant dining, using other means – footpower, a bike, or the bus – to cut back on driving (and the cost of gas), selling off your clutter and many more simple-to-do ideas.

Other ways to augment your retirement income include working part time, being a consultant, turning hobbies into money-makers, and many more.

There’s a section on new activities you can take on with the luxury of more time – furthering your education, learning a new language, taking up carpentry, and becoming a wine aficionado.

A nice section on relationships notes that working couples who both retire will find they are spending a lot more time with each other than they are used to. “Make sure you have separate interests and see your own friends. That way, you’ll have something to talk about when you get home.”

Our late mother used to say that when Dad retired, he spent the first year following her around and reading her items out of the paper. So she “assigned” him some new tasks – he took over doing the laundry, and loading and unloading the dishwasher, which he did with aplomb.

This fun, well-written and very helpful book concludes by offering some words of wisdom from famed comic actor George Burns – “you can’t help getting older, but you don’t have to get old.”

It’s always nice to have a few twenties in the wallet when you’re retired. If you don’t have a pension program through work, you’ll need to handle saving on your own. A fine partner in your saving efforts is the Saskatchewan Pension Plan. It’s a full-service personal retirement system – your contributions are invested in a professionally managed, pooled fund, at a low cost, and when it is time to turning savings into income, SPP has many options for you, including lifetime annuities. Check them out today!

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