Why a Plan Matters (But Isn’t the Point)
Most people think retirement planning is about money.
While financial planning is important, the real challenge is navigating your mental and emotional transition.
A comprehensive retirement plan considers the factors you’ll face during the retirement transition.
It helps you to recognize, think through, and prepare in advance.
Unfortunately, many pre-retirees focus only on the retirement fantasy highlights (cruises, golf, freedom, sleeping in), and they’re unprepared for what happens during the major transition of retirement.
A retirement plan gives you a clearer sense of direction and control.
But the point of retirement is not to follow a plan. It’s a starting point.
Retirement is an adventure into reinvention.
Money Alone Can’t Prepare You
Often, traditional retirement planning focuses solely on financial matters, which is incredibly short-sighted.
It’s great to plan financially for your retirement. If you don’t set aside money during your working life, you may not be able to retire, or you may not be able to retire at the income level that you desire.
It’s also essential to have a budget for your retirement spending. How much can you spend without worrying about running out of money before you die?
What You Lose When You Stop Working
However, an effective retirement plan is more than just financial.
It’s about anticipating the mental transition issues you’ll face in retirement and planning ways to address them.
Tom had been planning his retirement for 20 years. But two weeks after his last day, he sat at his kitchen table, wondering why he suddenly felt lost.
1. Loss of Identity and Purpose
The primary issue when people stop working is a loss of identity. This results in a loss of purpose and meaning.
Celia Dodd captures this disruption well:
“Retiring involves one of the biggest shifts of identity we ever go through… you become an ex-whatever it was.” Not Fade Away: How to Thrive in Retirement
Men especially identify with their work. Men tend to take great pride in their competence in whatever they do. And that’s a big part of their identity as men.
However, when you retire, you lose that identity. Retirement coaches Roberta Taylor & Dorian Mintzer, writing in The Couple’s Retirement Puzzle, note there is one main question:
‘Who am I now that I’m no longer who I used to be?’
Joshua Becker points out in his book, “Things That Matter,” the key to a happy retirement is to have something you are retiring to. The difference is having a purpose.
2. Loss of Status
In addition to loss of purpose and meaning, there’s also a loss of status.
Loss of status is a common issue for retirees and can be particularly challenging.
When you retire, you become invisible.
The loss of status is tied to the identity loss that comes with retirement. We may have gained significant status by the time we retire.
Retirement specialist Celia Dodd has written about the loss of status:
“Leaving any kind of work means moving out of an arena where you’re respected for what you do, for your knowledge and experience, and into new situations where you’re more likely to be judged by what you look like.” Not Fade Away: How to Thrive in Retirement
3. Loss of Social Connection
When we’re working, there are many opportunities to develop new friendships and build strong social connections. We’re on the job for hours every day and have frequent contact with fellow workers.
Very few work relationships continue when you stop working. That can lead to a sense of loneliness, leaving you feeling like there’s a hole in your life.
4. Loss of Structure and Routine
When people think about retirement, they look forward to getting rid of the structure and routine of work. They imagine that having no structure equals freedom.
However, as time passes, most retirees feel a need for routine to give their lives some structure. Waking up each morning with no idea what you’ll be filling the day with is not freedom, it’s drifting.
As retirement expert Riley Moynes writes in his book, The Four Phases of Retirement,
“After a while, too much vacation is, well, too much. The early excitement of having no routine gives way to a desire to get back to a routine.”
Build a Flexible Post-Work Framework
Things will change when you retire and during your retirement.
Therefore, retirement plans need to be viewed not as written-in-stone plans, but as flexible guidelines.
You won’t even know what retirement will be like for you until you’re actually in it.
This is not like a financial plan that you stick to once it’s been designed.
Some former financial planners tend to treat mental retirement plans like financial plans. They push clients to follow them, even if, after retirement, they don’t really make sense anymore. They check in at six months, and if you’re not following the plan, they pressure you to do so.
I think that’s a huge mistake.
It fails to make a critical distinction between financial plans and retirement plans.
Reinvention Takes Time and Experimentation
The key to navigating the retirement transition is to discover who you are after retirement.
That takes time.
You will have to experiment to find out what works and what doesn’t work for you.
It will likely take some time for you to figure out who you are and who you want to become without a job identity.
Riley Moines writes in “The Four Phases of Retirement,”
“There’s much trial and error and many false starts. Try one thing or another.”
Retirement podcaster Dan Halett, writing in “The Fragile Decade,” says,
“It’s not about ‘finding yourself’ once and for all; it’s about becoming yourself, in layers, over time.” Humans vs. Retirement blog, June 20, 2024.
This means that coming up with a retirement plan where you say, “OK, I’m going to do this and this will provide my purpose,” may not be what actually happens.
Just as we change our interests and our curiosities before retirement, we can expect that same process to happen after retirement.
Retirement plans need to be extremely flexible and tentative. The big question that we are going to have to answer after we retire is,
“Who am I now that I’m no longer who I used to be?” Roberta Taylor and Doreen Mintzer, The Couple’s Retirement Puzzle
It takes time and experimentation to figure that out.
Embrace the Adventure of Reinvention
Although not writing about retirement, Anne-Laure Le Cunff’s advice in her popular book Tiny Experiments is appropriate:
“Ultimately, living a generative life is about embracing the adventure of not knowing where your path will lead while trusting that you will find fulfillment along the way.”
What You Can Start Doing Now:
• Make a curious list that answers the question, “What am I curious about that I’d like to find out more about or experience?”
• Draft a “retiring to” list. What do you plan to do during your retirement?
• Identify some new identities you might want to adopt after work.
• Create a social connection plan. Do you have non-work friends before you retire?
• Choose one experiment to run in the first 90 days after retirement.
AI Note: I wrote this blog post myself, using my own words and thoughts for the initial draft. I used AI only to suggest headlines, section headings, images, and text improvements.
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