Manage Your Retirement Care to Enjoy Your Golden Years

Retirement care is among the vaguest types of senior care. This care can imply home health care services, personal assistants, financial planning, and aging-in-place home renovations, among other retirement services. In fact, the only distinguishing feature of retirement care is that it’s usually much more low-key compared to other senior care, such as respite care, hospice care, or other assisted living resources. Yet, no matter what your situation, here are some things you should consider for both your immediate and long-term retirement care plans.

Retirement Care and Lifestyle Strategies

• Stay Active, but Remove Stressors: When many people retire, they have a tendency to overreact and over-adjust to their new lifestyle. No matter how burnt-out you may be from decades on the job, lounging around reading a book or watching TV may make you stir crazy in a week or less. That said, you also can’t do everything you have planned for your retirement in the first week or month. Home improvement projects, extra grocery shopping, house cleaning, and travel can make you just as exhausted as you used to be. Hiring an aide or two for your retirement care can allow you to exercise in your home gym or go for a nature hike, while your aide wades through the stress-filled foot traffic at the grocery store. This sort of stress-free activity may sound almost indulgent at first, but it is your retirement, you’ve earned it.
• Trim, but Don’t Eliminate, Active Hobbies: On a similar note, you should evaluate your weekly chores for their inherent enjoyment. Maybe you love to tend your garden, but pushing or driving the lawn mower around the yard always felt like work. You can hire a lawn care company to complete only those tasks you no longer feel like tackling. You can have your aide do the dishes, while you continue to dust and vacuum. Often, the most effective retirement plans involve achieving a balance that pushes you to retain your mobility without shredding your arteries from stress-induced cortisol secretion.
• Plan for the Future: Your retirement needs may be pretty low-key right now, but it’s unlikely to remain this way indefinitely. One mishap, one illness, less family, any number of unexpected, yet inevitable events can escalate the level and type of home health care services you need. Planning for your future retirement care should include deepening your understanding of your ability to co-exist with hired home health aides. You should also consider a pros and cons list of moving into an assisted living retirement village vs. hiring round-the-clock home health care services for your later retirement years. By completing smart home renovations—increasing your accessibility to light switches, counter space, toilets, showers, not to mention making it through doors and hallways in a wheelchair—you can live in your home indefinitely and despite severely limited mobility.
• Hire a Financial Planner: One of the most common mistakes with retirement—especially among men according to statistical data—is to manage your own finances. You need to find someone you can trust and you need to manage and communicate the level of financial risk you’re willing to assume, but if you have the funds to retire, you should no longer need to worry about money everyday of your life. Stay proactive, review your statements diligently, and have meetings with your financial planner, but you should think twice before you manage your retirement portfolio by yourself.

Home Health care and Retirement

As much as you may want to think about handing off your retirement portfolio to a financial planner, you do need to stay aware and on top of your health care. This involves doing what you can to preserve your physical and mental health. More than just removing stress and lining up home health aides, remember to engage in mental exercises to keep your mind sharp.

You don’t need a heated and controversial political debate to recognize the wisdom of end-of-life counseling. From annual exams and cancer screening to the effects and implications of inserting a feeding tube, discussing potential end-of-life health concerns and outcomes can remove unnecessary decision-making burdens that your closest family members might otherwise face.

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