One of the most fulfilling and most fun parts of my job is working with people who are near retirement. You can almost touch their excitement and anticipation; it’s so thick.
And for good reason.
These individuals have spent decades doing work to make a living, scrimping and saving along the way so that one day their accumulated wealth is enough to support their lifestyle without requiring outside income from a job. Planning and preparing for retirement is like no other goal on Earth. What other activity do you begin preparing for 30 or 40 years in advance?
Getting to retirement is an enormous accomplishment. It should rightly be highly anticipated. But I’m amazed at how often people have only a vague sense of what they will do in retirement.
From what I can tell, one of the first thoughts of near retirees seems to involve the alarm clock. There’s no need for that any longer. How nice. Days can be spent doing whatever they want, on their own time and schedule. There are no bosses, no meetings, no deadlines, no demands.
The freedom is seductive.
And while that’s all well and good, it’s not good enough. Retirement isn’t necessarily easy. You have to work at it. You need a game plan for it – not a fully flushed out, written, and double-spaced plan. But at least a framed and roughed-in plan, to use a construction analogy.
Those who have only vague notions of what will fill their days after their careers end often experience a three-phase retirement: relaxation, revelation, and redefinition.
Retirement starts out just as they anticipate. Every day begins with a blank canvass. Anything is possible. But they quickly discover that blank canvases are boring. They only become stimulating after someone adds paint strokes and color. That takes vision and effort. In short, they realize doing nothing all day isn’t actually all that fun.
And that leads to shock. This particular time in life for which they yearned so long and deeply is not what they thought it would be. That revelation produces a sense of shock. Whether we know it or not, a job delivers certain valuable, though covert, benefits. A job provides purpose. It offers structure. It arouses our intellect. And it helps form our identity.
Those things all need to be replaced in retirement to some degree.
That realization is the genesis of the third phase, which is redefinition. Retirees discard what they thought retirement would be and form a new notion for how they want to spend their time. As a result, many people get more involved. They find people and causes they care about. They use their time to strengthen personal bonds, to make a difference. Life becomes more fulfilling again.
So before you retire, think about how you will spend your precious time. Will you help more at your church? Will you join the board of a non-profit organization? Will you see your grandkids more often? Will you travel? Will you pick up a new hobby?
All of those are worthwhile activities and should be pursued if they arouse your interest. Try new things. Do something you never thought was possible. Keep life interesting.
The most successful retirees are the ones who remain active. They don’t seclude themselves from the outside world but become an active participant in it.
For those nearing retirement, if you can pull it off, I truly believe a phased retirement is beneficial. If you can work two or three days a week for a year or two before fully retiring, you essentially take a test drive for retirement. It creates the space you need to begin reinventing your identity.
Don’t fool yourself: Retirement still requires work. It just takes a different form. But approached with intention, it can be the most fulfilling work of your life.
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