Value Your Retirement

Everyone speaks about the necessity of their retirement assets and the quality of life they want to live when retirement day finally arrives. Financial matters are carefully scrutinized and divided over the best anticipated funds or stocks to get the highest return to enhance and provide for that retirement. Homes are updated and upgraded and sometimes downsized to meet the lifestyle of the current atmosphere. The concern I feel is how healthy will your body, mind and soul be when retirement day arrives?

If you spent as much time paying attention to the signs and signals your body gives you, would you require all those medications that you are counting out everyday? If you would take the time to stop and evaluate your eating habits and your lack of exercise as seriously as you do your finances, I think you would be very surprised. Some people spend so much time reviewing the outside parameters of their lives that they don’t realize that they are getting older, slower and are visiting the MD a lot more often.

Retirement age is approaching. Acknowledge that you are not as young as you used to be and take steps to improve the quality of your current health life. Some people seriously think medical conditions only afflict the what they perceive to be the elderly. How wrong can you be! Obesity, heart disease, diabetes, arthritis, Alzheimer’s is striking younger and younger. It is scary to think that all the effort you put into having a great retirement ends up being utilized to pay doctor bills or high medicine prices. Those vacations you planned on waiting until retirement to take will never materialize. All that time you spent preparing when you could have been enjoying.

Become important to yourself. If you didn’t hear me the first time, I said, “Become important to yourself.” Begin today by making a list of all the areas of your life that need updating or upgrading. How long has it been since you had a complete physical? Include all blood work and x-rays to check yourself out from head to toe. If there are any discrepancies, find out what you need to do to tweak your dietary intake or current exercise program to minimize any foreseeable problems. Improve your daily life. Go ahead and evaluate your finances but also look at how healthy your relationships, personal awareness, career and community life are. Make life enjoyable again. Get some passion for living back to the surface of your life.

What do you expect from yourself at this point in your life? How much joy are you experiencing right now? Do you even remember what joy is? When is the last time you did something just for fun? Did you choose it or were you sharing someone else’s good time? Do you just visit or babysit your grandchildren or do you play games with them? Can you resurrect any old hobbies? When was the last time you read a great book or went to the movies? Start now, do not wait for retirement.

Start to realize that when you make everything and everybody else more important than yourself, you create a grumpy, miserable, self lacking person that complains about stress and usually has high blood pressure. Do something today to make yourself smile and begin to get healthy from head to toe. Don’t wait until death of someone close or divorce forces you to face your future. Start with simple steps and have some Joy and Enjoy!