I have a good friend who had a successful career in the military before retiring as a Major General. Starting out as an officer cadet in his teens, his thirty-something-year service took him all over the country in postings ranging from a few months in some units to a few years in others. He has gone on several trainings, missions and postings outside the country. His career, just as with equally successful individuals in the civil service and the public sector, had exposed him to certain ways of doing things and living with others. My friend has now relocated back to his hometown with his spouse and two young children.
Given my friend’s wise ways of gradually making good investments spanning his years of active service, I have little to no concern for his and his family’s current and future financial position. But relocating back to a community that he left when he was a teenager and taking along young children who have been exposed to the best that the country provides to its privileged can come with issues that should be understood, put in perspective and handled pragmatically for the individual and family well-being. So, what should individuals who retire and relocate away from where they have worked be aware of?
Who are your neighbours? Depending on where you relocate to and who your neighbours may be, you may need to watch out for a few things. If you are lucky your neighbours are as ‘exposed’ to the world as you have been, you can easily fit in well and you and your neighbours would understand where each is coming from on issues. If, however, your neighbours have not had the privileges and opportunities you have had, living and understanding each other might be trickier. Besides your neighbours, you may now be closer to your extended family members, many of whom have not had your education and experiences.
Regardless of who you live with or near to, it is in your interest to create a model that makes you both available for decent engagement and also protects you in your safe bubble. Engaging decently and protecting your bubble involves a number of things. For one, do only the things you can afford to and are happy, comfortable, and safe doing.
Exercise caution: It is better to be slow in connecting/reconnecting with people in a new environment than be fast in doing so. At the age a person retires, it is probably better to err on the side of caution. This means taking your time before you let your guard down, if at all. Be alert to everything happening and everyone around you. As the head, you need to help take particular and extra care of your family members until everyone is fully settled down.
Watch and learn fast: When we relocate to a place either newly for the first time or back after a few decades of being away, the place and people would not be exactly what we imagined or what we knew it to once be. Hence, we must take our time to learn as much as we can and as fast as possible.
We will need to understand the thinking and traditions of the people. Getting to make new friends or reconnecting with old ones; Getting to learn the environment in greater detail, etc. During the learning period, you should ask more questions than provide answers to unasked questions, except if that helps you in setting your expectations and standards. You definitely must be interested in the friends that your children are trying to make. And whilst your spouse might not need guidance like your children on making friends, it is also appropriate that you know the friends they are beginning to engage with.
Identify key service providers: On relocation, you need to identify where facilities like police stations, hospitals etc. might be. Similarly, early into your relocation, you need to get recommendations for good service providers like electricians, plumbers, etc. In engaging with such, however, take your time and ensure you have enough of their details recorded to protect yourself and your family. You need to know where the shopping malls are; Where to get the best deals for the groceries and other required supplies. Even as I am not inclined to encourage retirees to eat out because of financial considerations, it is sometimes expedient or pragmatic to do so. Some other times we have visitors that we are inclined or would prefer to eat out with. So, you should get to know the cafes and the restaurants around.
Set your standards and respect others: By the time we retire after decades in our careers, professions and business, we have formed most of the ways we do what we do. But relocation offers us yet another opportunity to get to do new things or old things better and positively differently from some of what and how we used to do them. We can establish our good ways of doing things and/or set new standards that we wish to abide by and which we expect others to respect, too. From the beginning of your settling at a new location, make clear the things that you do not accept and encourage what you accept. The benefit of setting our standards is that people get to respect them in ways that help us and them.
Setting your standards and ‘enforcing’ them also means that you should respect others’. When we live with others in our retirement, we are probably living with people of different backgrounds, education, experiences, idiosyncrasies etc. We should not feel we must force our ways. Rather, there are boundaries within which we each have rights and responsibilities and outside which we also have responsibilities and rights. It helps us and our relationship with others to respect other people’s legitimate rights and even weaknesses. After all, we aren’t perfect either!
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