Retired? You May Be About to Waste the Most Productive, Fulfilling Time of Your Life?
Photo by Cristofer Jeschke on Unsplash
Your financial planner just called you to a special meeting in his office to deliver some news. It’s all good. You’ve hit your investment goals and are financially prepared to retire!
You started a diligent, leveraged savings plan at 28 and now, 35 years later and with his help along the way, you’ve ridden out a half-dozen market corrections, survived a couple of job changes and plenty of “normal” life challenges but never wavered from your savings plan and have become one of the estimated 11 million millionaires in the U.S.
Congratulations!! Retirement day. Retirement nirvana at last!!
You are about to step into one the most potentially dangerous times of your life.
Your financial planner’s good news is called the “Liberation Stage”, number three of the five stages of retirement defined by Dr. Ken Dychtwald of AgeWave. The coveted retirement day!
His organization defined these five stages after interviewing 55,000 baby-boomers who were in retirement.
You can revisit these five stages in my January 6, 2018 article.
AgeWave identified the two stages preceding retirement as the “Imagination Stage” (5-15 years before expected retirement) and the “Anticipation Stage” (5 years before retirement).
Their research showed that 85-90% of pre-retirees in both these preliminary stages expected to be happy and 75-80% expected to achieve their dreams in retirement.
The average duration of Stage Three – the “Liberation Stage”? One year!
On average, it appears that it takes about a year for the reality of retirement to take hold.
Stage four and five – “Reorientation Stage” and “Reconciliation Stage” – revealed a different story than that expected in pre-retirement with only 40% of retirees achieving their happiness and retirement dreams.
A “gap analysis” needed.
A test score of 40% reminds me of what I achieved on most of my civil engineering courses in my first year of college before I was politely and appropriately asked to exit the institution for a while and come back for another probationary try at something else, like, well anything but engineering.
If retirement doesn’t seem to get even a fist pump for over half of those stepping into it, what’s missing? After all, it is that “nirvana” phase that consumed 35-40 years of our lives to get to and that promised us – at least in the financial services ads – a life of freedom, comfort, and fun.
Why are we coming up a bit short on that promise for the majority of retirees?
It’s a fertile area for pontification, philosophical waxing, and slicing-and-dicing. I’ll abandon my tendency to excel in all three of those boring, alienating methods and submit a single theory behind the gap.
It’s a simple triumvirate:
No plan
No people
No purpose
No plan
We know that 2 of 3 retirees enter retirement with little or no non-financial plan. They expect their retirement to “evolve” and take care of itself. They expect the transition to freedom and leisure to be fulfilling. They enter retirement unaware that retirement is like an iceberg – 80% of the realities of retirement are hidden from view and not discussed or planned for.
No people
Those work cohorts who promised to “stay in touch” as they wolfed down a slice of your retirement cake aren’t calling – or returning your calls to schedule a “lunch to reminisce”. It seems they have their own set of challenges and you aren’t coming to mind a whole lot – not since about 30 seconds after you left the building.
So your “friends list” begins to narrow significantly unless you proactively rebuild it. Certainly deeper and broader engagement with family is vital and an opportunity to make up for lost time. But that’s not likely an arena in which to find new and different levels of mental stimulation and social engagement.
That sitcom and lazyboy are tempting substitutes for proactively building a new social network.
We now have research that tells us that a lack of social engagement is equivalent to smoking 15 cigarettes a day. It’s the newest entrant into the list of things that kill us early.
No purpose
Egad, not this purpose thing again!!
Yep. Face it – you had a purpose before retirement, even if it was no more than showing up and building someone else’s dream for the money to get you to retirement nirvana. Now even that shallow purpose is gone and the potential for serious drifting sets in after you’ve completed the third cleaning and rearranging of the garage and basement storage space.
Five rounds of golf a week isn’t changing your handicap much but the obligatory 19th hole with fellow drifters is adding inches to the waistline.
If you are fortunate, at some point early in your post-career life, your soul delivers a groin kick and says that it’s tired of being only a consumer and not a producer and that if this continues, the reward may be serious health, wellness, and sanity issues.
It’s just suggesting that the soul exists to serve, not take. It’s kind of a divine thing that’s built into us that gets barnacled over in our pursuit of comfort and convenience and adherence to convention, conformity, and comparison.
Give it some space.
Take a year – do the fun stuff. Visit Machu Pichu and the Buddhist ruins and float the Rhine. Bore your family and declining circle of friends with your endless photos of places they have no interest in visiting – or have already visited. Do the country club thing for a year and get it out of your system.
But while you are at it, do some serious reflecting on this simple string of questions:
Why am I here”
Am I meant to be “leisurely” for the next 20,30,40 years?
Isn’t there somebody/some entity I can help with the 55+ years of accumulated experience and the innate talents that I have?
If I stumbled into my funeral just in time to hear my eulogy, what would I want the eulogist to be saying?
The dangers of an unplanned post-career life are physical, mental and emotional deterioration and an accelerated dash to a shortened finish line.
You don’t deserve that; you weren’t designed for that.
Our post-career choices are to be selfish (consumer) or selfless (producer).
Our society sure could use us for the latter.
Nice. I appreciate how you bring us back to the simplicity of the basics of “No plan, no people, no purpose”.
This was the best “wake-up” call I’ve read. I plan to exit my career path in in 5 years. I started my planning at age 60. I’m 62, now. I’m reading more and more about planning, planning, plan. My wife has no plan, and she’s 1 year younger than I. I’ve even “suggested” that she plan to at least move to another company that will offer her a higher pay, and at least get another retirement account going. But I don’t see her planning for retirement at all. The government does provide me with a retirement informational seminar, held each month. I’ve already attended 1 live one that was a week long, a couple of years ago. Now it’s all online. There’s so much information, I know I need to talk with someone to settle my nerves. For now, I need more information. I’m still planning to exit with 40 years total (20 military and soon 20 Civil Service), by 2025.
Thank you for another fantastic post. The place else may just anyone get that type of information in such an ideal way of writing? I’ve a presentation next week, and I am at the search for such information.