As happy retirees, we are often asked what being retired is like. Is it, one younger friend asked, like being on vacation 24/7?

No, we said – but it is more like waking up and every day is the weekend.

That got us thinking – what do famous people say about retirement?

Let’s start with the great Gordie Howe, whose epic long career in professional hockey with the NHL, the WHA, and back to the NHL again, will likely never be matched.

The Internet Pillar site quotes him as saying “I don’t want to retire, because you stay retired for a really long time.”

He also once said “it’s not easy to retire. No one teaches you how. I found that out when I tried it the first time,” the site notes.

According to the AZquotes website there are some other interesting thoughts.

“In the end, it’s not the years in your life that count. It’s the life in your years,” U.S. President Abraham Lincoln once said.

“You know you’re getting old when you stoop to tie your shoelaces and wonder what else you could do while you’re down there,” quipped the late comedian George Burns, who lived beyond age 100.

Children’s writer A. A. Milne of Winnie the Pooh fame once noted “don’t underestimate the value of Doing Nothing, of just going along, listening to all the things you can’t hear, and not bothering.”

Southern Living provides us with a few more thoughts.

“Often when you think you’re at the end of something, you’re at the beginning of something else,” Fred Rogers, star of Mr. Rogers’ Neighbourhood, once said.

The late actress Betty White, the publication reports, once said “retirement is not in my vocabulary. They aren’t going to get rid of me that way!”

Actor Chris Pine, the magazine notes, once said “my father calls acting `a state of retirement with short spurts of work,’” and golfer Chi-Chi Rodriguez noted that “when a man retires, his wife gets twice as much husband for half as much money.”

Comedian and philosopher Will Rogers summed retirement up this way, the magazine tells us. “Half our life is spent trying to find something to do with the time we have rushed through life trying to save.”

Let’s finish off with some quotes from the Lasting Quotes website.

“I can’t say I was unhappy, but I was not as happy as I am now since I’ve retired,” notes author Garrison Keillor.

“You know you’re getting old when the candles cost more than the cake,” the site quotes Bob Hope as saying.

And a final, anonymous thought – “retirement is not the end of the road. It is the beginning of the open highway.”

If there’s a theme to all these quotes, it perhaps is that while it is often hard to give up what you’ve been doing for years – decades, even – you may get a chance to be happy doing something else, for yourself, in retirement.

If you’re saving on your own for life after work, a willing and capable partner is the Saskatchewan Pension Plan. Open to any Canadian with registered retirement savings plan (RRSP) room, SPP is a voluntary defined contribution plan.

You can contribute any amount you want, up to your RRSP limit, each year – and you can transfer in any amount from other RRSPs you might have.

SPP’s job in all of this is to grow your savings in our professionally managed, low-fee pooled fund. When work’s in the rearview mirror, your retirement income options include a monthly SPP annuity payment for life, or the more flexible Variable Benefit.

Check out SPP today!

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