If you find yourself approaching retirement then you’ll need to consider these five tips to ensure a successful retirement.

First and foremost is health. It’s never too late to take control of your health and make improvements. Even if you've lived a lifetime chained to a desk for 8 hours a day, ate mostly fast foods, and had other bad habits. In your retirement years, you’ve got a second chance to turn things around. With extra time you can plan your meals carefully and start an exercise program. One of the keys to success is to make slow steady changes. This is especially true for exercise. If you try to do too much all at once, your body will find it just too hard to adjust and exercise will become aversive. Be sure to get enough water to drink. One of the best things you can do for your health is to drink enough water. In fact, one nursing home study found a significant improvement in patient health just from increasing fluid intake. If you do not like water, check out all the great flavored waters. These days, you can find just about any flavor – including chocolate mint waters.

Second is your finances. It’s pretty difficult to make sure that you have enough for retirement these days when most 401K plans are tied to the stock market which can fall substantially in a short time. Planning ahead is important. If you haven’t planned much before your retirement, you may need to watch your money even more carefully. Develop a budget and look for ways to save. Check your incoming and outgoing funds. Reducing outgoing funds: make cutbacks where possible, clip coupons and shop for bargains. Learn to live frugally. Find ways to increase your incoming funds. Explore your skills to see what you can do to bring some money in and learn how to make money on-line from the comfort of your home.

A third factor to keep in mind is time management. Now, you may be thinking that you’ve got all the time in the world so you don’t have to worry about time, but the amazing thing you will discover is that time still passes extremely quickly. It becomes all too easy to put things off for another day because so many days stretch out before you with few deadlines. One way to avoid this problem is to keep to a schedule despite your temptations to toss scheduling altogether. Self-imposed deadlines will also help keep you productive.

Maintaining contacts is a fourth feature of a successful retirement. This can be especially difficult if all your friends were from your work environment. You may find it takes extra effort on your part to stay in touch because the "glue" of the work world no longer binds the friendship. Old colleagues get busy with their lives and it becomes the old – "out of sight, out of mind" thing. You just aren’t on their radar anymore so don’t take it too personally if you don’t hear from them as much.

And the fifth and final tip for a successful retirement: keep your mind active during retirement. Find things that interest you, do puzzles, read, and pursue those things that you’ve always been interested in, but never had the time to do. This is a great time for self-exploration and development. Enjoy it!