Retiring Retirement

Introducing the Aspirational Phase

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The word Retirement can mean all kinds of things. Some people might imagine sitting around and watching TV most days while some envision older folks walking along the beach in Europe and laughing as they drink Limoncello.

Some don’t think it’s ever going to be possible and so they don’t allow themselves to think about it.

Retirement is different for everybody, and that’s the point, but it can be surprising to hear that retirees suffer some of the highest rates of depression, of any group. So let’s talk about why that is, and how to retire better. (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7551681/)

 Retirement Factors

Retirement can be awesome and it can be a bummer. Money has a big influence on how happy a person is on retirement, but it’s not the only factor. Other things that determine happiness in retirement are:

• Health: keeping an exercise regiment and healthy eating provide improved bodily health which effects mental health.

• Managing a daily schedule or routine, so there’s some semblance of time being tracked.

• Contribution: this includes having on impact on things that are greater than the self, whether that’s community, charities, group endeavours, church, family, friends or business.

• Goal-Setting: This is a useful tool for getting enough dopamine.

• If we combine Goal-Setting and Contribution, we get close to the concept of Purpose. Purpose is effectively a reason to get up in the morning and stay motivated throughout the day.

• Social Engagement: a person can be social with friends, but it could even be interacting with a friendly cashier, someone you see whilst walking through the park, but the more meaningful the social engagement is, the higher degree of happiness.

• Environment: from city-slickers to woodsmen, everyone has their own preferred environment. It’s important to get time in the environments that a person wants to be in.

• Intellectual Engagement:  this doesn’t mean being an academic, but it does mean using one’s expertise and gifts so they are focused on things that they enjoy. This feeds back into contribution.

What’s interesting is the list above does not explicitly state things like travel, family, avoiding problems, how long someone spends in retirement. It’s not because those things don’t matter, it’s because they are specific to individuals, so travel might be part of Goal-Setting, social engagement, changing one’s environment, and managing a schedule, while family will be part of social engagement, contribution and purpose.

The funny thing about retirement is, work can be an incredible solution for many of these things. What this means is, retirement can be structured in all kinds of different ways, but generally most people have a view of retirement that looks like this:

The standard phases for a working person's life

In your young years, you go to school, get trained and learn. This is the Adolescence Phase of life.

Then comes Adulthood, which are the working years. These are also the years when most people report highest levels of stress and lowest levels of happiness. (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18316146/).

Then we think comes the Retirement ages when we clock out of work for the last time, and relax until the end.

While this can work for many people, it’s not the only way. Here's an example:

A person might have soft-retirement where they work half time for some extra years.

Perhaps a person takes sabbaticals throughout their career which is more common in academia but anyone could do it.

Phased retirement is where someone scales back and finishes off years later (or keeps going forever).

Some folks might take time to retrain for a mid-life reinvention so they can switch careers

There’s a temporary soft-retirement that is common for parental leave but it could be the family traveling in a campervan for a couple of years.

We also have the “I’m Good” version which is work will always be a way of life, and that’s ok.

These are all just models, and as the George Box quote goes,

 “All models are wrong, but some are useful”

 The reality is, that Lifestyle Planning is messier and less predictable. So some people will have a false start retirement where they retire from a corporate career, get bored, go back to work for a small business for some time, and then resume their retirement.

Many people nowadays change careers several times.

And it’s more common to see a mix of training/education that extends further into life as retirement comes in waves. It’s not truly knowable, but understanding that these things will change, makes it easier to plan for.

The truth is, the secret ingredient that most people don’t think of in retirement, at least before they’ve given it some thought is…. Work.

Work does not have to mean clocking in and doing a shift at the factor, but work in a sense of something that enables the happiness and meaning during retirement like:

• Health

• Having daily schedule

• Contribution to something bigger than one’s self

• Goal-setting

• Having purpose

• Social engagement

• Engaging one’s mind

Work can and often does provide lots of those things. Remember, work may not do all the things, that you want, which is why having some sense of autonomy will help balance that out If you want to spend more time with your grandkids, working 60 hours per week may not be for you. For example:

If you want to travel for 3 months in each year, then having some kind of work that is flexible will be important.

Work might be simply volunteering for a non-profit entity or tutoring children outside of school hours.  These are personal choices which is why they are so important.

What about Retiring Early?

This is one big problem with the FIRE notion, or “Retire Early”, because that means a person has more years of their life to fill with something, that is NOT work. If someone retires at 45 and doesn’t work ever again, they might have 50 years of twiddling their thumbs or finding ways to fill their calendar and stave off depression.

Let's Wrap This Up

Given work is an important factor throughout life and retirement, at Irvine Wenborn, we like the idea of ‘retiring the concept of retirement’. We prefer to call it “The Aspirational Phase”.

The reason is because if planned well, retirement can be a time when people get the chance to live out their life’s work and enjoy the aspirations that they might have been putting off.

Let’s not forget that all of this does still require money to fund the type of life that most people want to live. When we combine the Lifestyle and happiness factors with money considerations, then we’re on track for a better, more holistic Aspirational Phase of life.

Remember:

 “Don’t simply retire from something; have something to retire to.” – Harry Emerson Fosdick