Life lesson: Don’t drop the ball on planning for your retirement

DEAR God, I thought, stunned. As the old Chuck Berry song goes: “ C’est la vie say the old folks, it goes to show you never can tell.”

Sitting out enjoying a warm sunset with a bottle of chilled white wine (and another one in the fridge just in case), my old friend and I watched rabbits savaging my baby lavender.

She was just back from a holiday exploring a remote and very beautiful part of the world that I will never get to see, not in a month of Sundays. Me? Well, I wasn’t long back from exploring the local Aldi for groceries and washing up after the dinner.

She is a successful white-collar professional who has never lacked for good friends or romantic partners. Owns a lovely home with a pretty garden (one where the rabbits would never dare to massacre anything) on the poshest of Eircodes on a truly lovely stretch of Irish coastline.

My friend retired around Christmas with a big bang and a splashy corporate party in a swanky hotel. For her, it had been a case of ‘Right, Bring on My Second Life’.

There was the gorgeous new state-of-the-art car, some kind of four-wheel-drive. There was the new house extension featuring an eye-wateringly on-trend designer kitchen and a vintage-style, plant-filled conservatory overlooking her lush patio. Which, of course, along with the garden, had also enjoyed a glorious makeover.

Then there was the travelling. She’d spent a week shopping in New York in the New Year. The weeks before Easter had brought her to the 15th century Inca citadel of Machu Picchu. Now she was just back from a lengthy scuba diving trip to, of all places, the Tuamotu archipelago in French Polynesia, which is a chain of remote islands and coral reefs in the Pacific Ocean somewhere off Tahiti and which – because it’s so remote and expensive to get to – the hoi polloi tends not to visit. So remote is it that the thriving local economy still relies, not on tourism, but on fishing, coconuts and black pearls, so my friend did her bit for the Tuamotuians by treating herself to a necklace of black pearls and diamonds. She’d brought me back a large set of Monoi Oils, which are scented moisturising oils made from the petals of the gardenia flower. So, all good. Except it wasn’t.

Her days seemed a bit long, she confessed, and time was becoming an issue; even she couldn’t keep dashing off on exotic holidays and adding bits on to her house. Some days she didn’t know what to do with herself.

She’d rung up work once or twice to suggest a catch-up Thursday evening meal with former colleagues. On the second occasion, someone commented acidly that while my friend might off be living the good life, they all still had an early start and a full day’s work on the Friday. My stomach lurched.

Now that I looked, really, really looked, she seemed a bit drawn. Her voice was flat, her eyes dull-ish. She’d been a bit down in herself and wasn’t sleeping well since she got back from Tua-wherever-it-was, she admitted. Something stirred in my mind.

“Just out of interest,” I ventured. “Did you do one of those retirement-planning things before you finished up?”

She looked blank.

“It’s just; well, I did a feature once on how to retire for one of the newspapers. There are these planning courses which explain about how to prepare for retirement; you know, finance, a healthy lifestyle with a good mix of hobbies and mental stimulation. Exercise. Charitable work and so on,” I said a bit feebly.

“Did HR talk to you about that at all?”

She sighed.

“God, is there actually anything you didn’t do a bloody article on?” she asked irascibly.

An edgy silence ensued. Ah, there it was. So they had tried to talk to her. And, surprise, surprise, she hadn’t listened. Time to take the bull by the horns.

“Jetting off to Tua-whatever is all well and good but getting a good walk in the morning and using some of that professional experience and life-wisdom to help others might be a wise thing to do,” I said tartly.

Her employers had paid her extremely well, I pointed out. She’d worked very hard, risen very high on the corporate ladder and travelled the globe for years, all expenses paid. Now she had a whopping pension too.

But, though she’d never admit it, she’d really dropped the ball on retirement planning.

I knew one or two other people who’d retired, I said. Maybe I could check with them? We took out our phones and looked it all up. Retirement planning was not, as she clearly feared, about how to measure yourself for a coffin. Worth a try, she conceded in the end, and retired to my spare room that night a much happier bunny.

Note to self: Sign up for retirement planning course ASAP – it’s coming down the tracks at me too.