Once you reach the age of retirement, you choose to continue working either because you love it, or because it’s a financial necessity. Sometimes you are simply able to do what you’ve been doing all or most of your life for as long as you wish, with barely a bump in the road. Other times you are forced to reinvent yourself as an income earner because the previous path has either become distasteful to you or is no longer an option.

If you are currently face-to-face with that transition stage of your life you know how daunting it can be to move through it. But if you slow down and consider who you are and what you have been, you can then begin to formulate what you can become. There are a number of ways of doing this, depending on what it is you do so well. Whether you were a lawyer or a doctor or a bank clerk or a salesperson, you have the richness of your experience that makes you valuable to others. Write down a list of all your strong suits and your special skills and talents. Keep thinking of things you know how to do, regardless of how seemingly inconsequential. Once you have finished your list—and it could take you days or even weeks to exhaust the possibilities—you will be able to add everything up and formulate a job or a profession or an income stream around your strongest qualities.

If you were a housewife and mother all your life, and never even entered the workforce, you are still an expert on something. Are you a good cook? Do you know how to knit? Are you good at organizing parties? Think of everything you’ve ever done over the years. If you’ve done them once or done them dozens of times, you know how to do things that others cannot. That’s where your value begins to rise in the workplace. You could give knitting lessons at $50 or more an hour. Are you aware of that? Or cooking lessons at a similar rate. You could train people’s dogs. Or design their landscapes or interiors. You could even baby-sit their babies. Money changes hands on all of these things. If you are an attorney who has worked in the real estate market, you would have no problem getting speaker’s fees at any of a number of organizations with members who would gladly pay to hear what you have to say. You could even write a book on the subject—on any subject, for that matter, that you know something about and can offer information that is not readily available to others. In case it slipped your mind, we are living in the Information Age, and people are willing to pay for the information they seek.