As times pass, the path towards retirement becomes more important, particularly in the last decade of your working years in the sport or healthcare niche. This is why the steps and planning in these last 10 years of your professional life are crucial in creating a worry-free retirement financial setting. Don’t forget that most sportsmen do not have much money after the end of their careers.
These last 10 years of your professional life are the ideal timeframe to make savings a top priority. However, with retirement coming closer, you have to consider some very crucial steps to smooth the change in the lifestyle and a successful transition into a new life. Simply saying – how to quit sport properly?
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A Perfect Retirement from sport
While you work toward this transition, think about how you will mold the plan. What are your plans after you retire? Are you planning to stop working definitely, or are you eager to start a business, or maybe a part-time job? Like many things in life, there are no definitive answers to such questions. That’s why you should personalize your perfect retirement by taking into consideration who you are, your values, your desires during the preparation period.
A Spending Plan
With retirement right around the corner, budgeting and financial planning take a whole new meaning. You should analyze and review your spendings to match your income and enjoy your perfect retirement. After you have a clear picture of how your income is distributed, you have the chance to re-allocate some cash for investments and savings for retirement.
Create forecasts and scenarios of your spending behavior during retirement, pay particular importance to speedings related to travel and health care, which will increase.
Also do not forget to take into consideration the changes in the financial environment, such as inflation. In this phase you will need all the help you can get, and using reliable and useful sources of financial information, such as MYFIN, is of utmost importance.
Accommodations
Assets management is a crucial factor in improving your retirement savings, on the other hand, your life happiness and cost of living are very closely linked with your retirement location.
Several factors impact the quality of life that have to be taken into consideration, like accessibility to health care, environment, housing costs, and possibilities to create meaningful connections with others. If during retirement you plan to change your home, do not forget to take into consideration the costs and impact on your budget.
Health Care
With sportsman retirement approaching, one of your main priorities is to secure reliable and affordable health insurance, because that’s really important. It is not difficult to forecast that a big portion of your budget will be allocated to health-related costs, this is true even for the ones who are on Medicare.
Assets Analysis
With retirement just around the corner, it is a good idea to change the strategy of your investment portfolio from growth into an income model. As you come closer to retirement, review your assets, and you might want to change to a more conservative model, by giving priority to cash and investments that pay dividends or bonds.
Bye-bye Debt
To greatly improve your expenses during retirement is highly advised to pay off your debt before. You should focus on paying initially high-interest debt, such as credit card debt, before retiring.
It is a little trickier whether to pay off the mortgage or not. Ideally, you will be in a much better position if you make the transition into retirement mortgage-free. However, if you choose to close your mortgage earlier, there is a risk you will neglect your savings and will not be able to benefit from tax-deferred gains.
An important element you need to analyze is your mortgage rate. If you took your mortgage or a refinance at a point in time when the rates were at a record low, it does not necessarily make financial sense to pay it off immediately. This way you will have more free cash to use for other needs or investments.
Be informed
It is very important to be ready for this important transition, and it is highly recommended that you do your research and planning using reliable and useful sources. Review your retirement plan and get ready for a new life.
How to get over the dismissal? Tips from psychologists
On the scale of stresses, the loss of work – one of the strongest human feelings. In the heat of passion, it is second only to divorce or the death of a loved one. Especially when it comes to firing or retirement. Even in a sports niche.
Experts advise: try to leave with dignity, without insulting others and not to destroy themselves. Your future life depends on how you will behave in this difficult time.
First your will!
There is a great temptation to say to your bosses what you think of them at the end. Or to do something nasty: to hide the necessary data, to take away with them the phone numbers of important customers, paralyzing the work of once dear firm for a while.
Don’t do it! First, the professional circle is very narrow, and when your new boss calls your former boss, he is unlikely to find even a couple of kind words to your address. Secondly, if you want to make the boss really sorry about your dismissal, you have to do the exact opposite.
Gather your will into fist and on the last day, say goodbye to him warmly, saying the kindest words. He may not call you back (which, incidentally, is not impossible), but probably will give an excellent performance. It doesn’t matter what kind of relationship you had before this minute. As you know, the first and the last words are the most memorable.
Losing a job often undermines a person’s self-esteem. They feel resentment and a sense of loss of control over their lives: “Why was I fired?”, “Am I really the worst worker?”, “I don’t decide anything in this life”. If you are visited by such thoughts, you need to tell yourself: “Stop! Life – it’s not just work. In such a difficult situation it is much more constructive to ask yourself another question – why has fate thrown you such a challenge, what lessons can be learned from it?
Practice shows that most often people who lose their jobs have two opposite psychological attitudes. First of all, these are those who unnoticeably began to live by inertia, for whom the work has long brought neither moral nor material satisfaction. But the poor man does not have enough courage to put his application on the table himself. So every morning he goes to work as if he were serving a forced labor sentence. So fate throws him an unexpected solution to the problem – in the form of staff reductions or rotations leading to dismissal.
Strange as it may seem, people with a different attitude – workaholics, who identify their life with work, putting it at the top of the scale of values in life, also risk losing their jobs. Often fate punishes for such one-sidedness. In addition, an overzealous employee often irritates his superiors: what if he turns out to be more professional than his superiors?
Don’t worry about this too much and go on building your career!