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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As our two Shelties (Duncan and Phoebe) pulled us around the neighbourhood the other day, we came upon a small group of younger folks — parents of school aged kids — enjoying a sunny late spring afternoon.

After some friendly chatting, talk turned to retirement. “You two are both retired now — what’s it like?”

After thinking a bit, our reply was this — “being retired is like every day is a Sunday.” It is not like every day is a vacation day — who could afford that — so it is more like the weekend, we explained. They liked that.

So Save with SPP decided to do a quick search for other peoples’ takes — ideally a short sentence — on what retirement is like.

We started by asking our new AI chat thingie what it thought retirement is like — in one sentence.

“Retirement is the time of life when one chooses to leave the workforce behind and live on savings, passive income, or benefits,” the AI doodad replied. OK, good, but we were thinking more of what it is like rather than what is literally is.

At the AAG website, a writer had a similar view to our own. When you are retired, the article notes, “now Fridays aren’t the best day of the week any more — they all are!”

A fairly recent article from Forbes didn’t boil it down to one sentence, but said these ten words are the ones most often used to describe retirement — “relax, happy, travel, retirement (of course), family, fun, success, freedom, money and fulfilled.”  This may not be an actual sentence but it captures a lot of what it’s like.

“Retirement is not the end of the road. It is the beginning of the open highway.” This two-sentence statement, original author unknown, was posted on the Southern Living website.

“We work all our lives so we can retire so we can do what we want with our time and the way we define or spend our time defines who we are and what we value,” states Bruce Linton. His quote is featured on the Goalcast website.

On the Goodreads website writer Charles Baxter describes retirement as being “gainfully unemployed; very proud of it too.” We like this one.

“Retirement is the best gift. No gold watch or plaque could ever top it,” state the folks at the Chapparal Winds Retirement Community website.

If there’s a common thread to all this, it’s that retirement means that your time is now yours, and it is up to you to decide what you’ll do with the time.

We saw that “money” was mentioned by Forbes magazine, and it’s true that money is part of it. The more you have when you retire, the more options you’ll have for your free time. So if you haven’t started saving for retirement — and maybe don’t have a pension or retirement savings plan through work — you ought to think about the Saskatchewan Pension Plan.

Any Canadian with registered retirement savings plan room can join. You can contribute as much as you want to each year (up to your personal RRSP room limit), and if you want to consolidate savings from other RRSPs into SPP, you can transfer any amount in. It’s how SPP makes your savings options limitless. Check out SPP today!

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