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Retirement is not a time when purpose is handed to you on a plate. If you've performed no advance research, you may find yourself wishing for the structure and busyness of the life you've left behind. If you've done the work to develop a personal retirement plan, however, you'll find yourself looking forward, not backward. That's a strong sign of a successful retirement plan.

The number of years that you can expect to spend in retirement is probably greater than it was for your parents. Perhaps you want to spend a good bit of your retirement just taking it easy. But you may have an opportunity that your parents did not -- that of adding other options to the agenda as well, whether they involve charity work, income-producing activities, cultural pursuits, or hobbies.

Show Me the Money
Be cautious in forming expectations about how much you can earn in fields in which you don't have much experience. This is especially true if you will be retiring somewhere near the conventional age of 65. The prudent approach is to save enough to meet all your spending needs in retirement, and then to apply any post-retirement earnings to a cushion account.

You might want to bend that rule a bit if you are seeking to retire earlier than the conventional age, however. I resigned from my corporate job at age 43, and planned to continue working at freelance writing and in other high-fulfillment/low-income fields. In developing my plan, I made an assumption that my post-retirement work could bring in an annual income of at least $10,000.

There are many people who have had enough of the corporate grind by age 65 (or sometimes well before that), but who like the idea of working in other environments for years to come. If you have a reasonable expectation of a post-retirement income, there's no reason why you should not include that amount in your financial calculations. Just remember that you need to be conservative in your assumptions because it's difficult to reenter the work force at your old rate of pay.

As retirements become longer and more active, and as awareness of the early retirement option spreads, I expect that the tasks of planning for the financial and emotional aspects of retirement will become increasingly intertwined. By anticipating an income at work that I enjoy after retirement, I was able to leave my corporate job earlier. And by leaving my corporate job earlier, I improved my prospects of earning more in my post-retirement work. By getting started in a new field of work at age 43, rather than waiting until age 65, I will be able to take advantage of experience and contacts that can only be gained over long stretches of time.

If you find yourself dissatisfied in your job at a time well short of normal retirement age, you might want to explore whether a low-pay dream job could produce enough income for you to leave. Again, the key to making this sort of strategy work is advance planning.