Two Kinds of Retirement Planning
When you consult an advisor for retirement planning, it’s all about preparing financially for retirement.
You want to ensure that, when you retire, you have adequate funds to maintain the lifestyle you desire for 10 to 40 years.
The financial advisor will evaluate your assets, assess your income, and develop a plan to fund your retirement.
Once this plan is designed, the advice is to stick with it and ride out any negative periods.
In contrast, non-financial retirement plans are made to be broken. They are not intended to be written in stone.
Read on to find out why.
The Shock Nobody Prepares You For
Most retirement planning is exclusively financial planning.
We neglect plans to successfully navigate the non-financial aspects.
People are not prepared to navigate the major life transition of retirement. Most people would be shocked to learn that retirement is deemed among the 10 most stressful transitions in life.
When people retire, they typically lose their identity, their purpose and meaning, status, and social network. It can be an extremely difficult transition and lead to depression.
A Tragic Lesson in What Planning Misses
As more financial professionals recognize this need, more transitional planning is being done.
Tony Hixon, a successful financial advisor, wrote in his book Retirement Stepping Stones about his experience counseling his mother-in-law before her retirement. He advised her that she could retire, given her financial situation. However, as is typical, he failed to address non-financial issues in retirement transitions.
Six months after she retired, she committed suicide. She’d lost her sense of meaning and purpose in life.
As a result of that tragic experience, he developed a comprehensive program for his clients that included retirement transition planning and financial planning.
The Danger of Treating Life Like a Spreadsheet
It’s great that more and more financial advisors are recognizing the need for non-financial retirement planning. That can only benefit their clients.
However, I’ve observed a trend in which many current or former financial professionals treat a retirement plan as they would a financial plan: as a plan that should resist change. Some advisors follow up with clients months after retirement to ensure they are still adhering to the plan.
That’s understandable given their background and competency in developing financial plans.
However, it’s a mistake to treat a non-financial retirement plan like a financial plan. It’s appropriate to counsel clients to stick with a well-developed financial plan regardless of predictable market fluctuations.
But a non-financial retirement plan is a different creature. It concerns personal desires, interests, challenges, and needs, all of which will change upon retirement and during retirement.
The Myth of the “Perfect” Retirement Vision
Retirement plans are made to be broken, not to be followed.
It’s a mistake to assume that a retirement plan established before (or even during) retirement will remain unchanged throughout retirement.
No one knows what retirement will be like for them until they retire. You can imagine what it will be like, but you won’t really know until you retire. Unrealistic retirement expectations are a common feature of advertising for financial plans and senior housing developments.
Retirement plans are like plans that are made before a battle. Military commanders understand the importance of developing battle plans, but they also understand the adage “No plan survives the first meeting with the enemy.”
“Regardless of how much effort you put into planning your dream retirement, you may still find that you don’t love it once you’re living it every day.”
Tony Hixon, Retirement Stepping Stones
Even if a plan initially aligns with your retirement expectations, you will change during your retirement. Your needs and desires will change over time, and your plan will need to change to reflect those.
A Life of Reinvention Doesn’t End at Retirement
Why would you think that life in retirement will be any different than life before you retire? You have likely changed your needs and desires many times during your life.
Most people don’t make a plan in adolescence for adulthood and then stick with it throughout their adult years. Careers often differ significantly from what was planned. People often change jobs and careers throughout their working lives.
I had three careers in the Air Force. I was enlisted as a Medical Administrative Specialist, then served as a Chaplain, and later as a Judge Advocate (a lawyer). My civilian career was as a minister, then as an attorney who initially focused on family law, and later on estate planning.
Why should we expect things to be any different in retirement?
Since retiring over 10 years ago, I’ve been a Sheriff’s Posse shift supervisor, a long-distance hiker, and a blogger on three topics. I’ve volunteered and worked part-time as a National Park Service ranger; I work part-time to assist a Creator friend with administrative tasks; and I’ve become a certified professional retirement coach.
Who knows what the future will bring for me? One thing is for sure: more changes.
Don’t Serve the Plan. Make It Serve You
That’s not to say that education and planning for retirement transition are not valuable. They are.
You need to know the factors and pitfalls inherent in the retirement transition. It’s important to develop a plan for what you’d like to do in retirement and how you will address each transition area.
Being aware of the pitfalls helps you prepare for retirement. For example, if all of your friends are at work, you know that if you retire, you’re going to basically lose all of those friendships. You can start working ahead of time to develop some non-work friendships so your entire social network doesn’t disappear.
However, you should also understand that any retirement plan you create is tentative at best and will likely require significant changes.
Change the plan to fit you.
Don’t change you to fit the plan.
Treat Your Retirement Plan Like a Draft, Not a Permanent Plan
A retirement plan is not a permanent plan written before you ever step into retirement.
It’s a draft. A hypothesis. An educated guess.
Its real purpose isn’t to lock you into a future—it’s to give you a place to start.
Once retirement begins, your lived experience becomes better data than any pre-retirement plan ever could.
If you haven’t retired yet and don’t have a non-financial retirement plan, seek out a retirement coach, books, or blogs that address this and put together a custom plan for you. But recognize it will likely change, and do so many times during your retirement.
If you have a retirement plan and have already retired, revisit your retirement plan this month and ask one simple question: What no longer fits the person I’m becoming? Then give yourself permission to change it.
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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