Retiring Soon? Follow This Advice

Financial planning matters—but retirement also requires a plan for purpose, routine and meaning.

💈💈💈

When my father retired, he was a really hard worker, and then he went home. He was a high school principal and all of a sudden there’s nothing there. My mother worked outta the house and after about six months she said, if you don’t develop a lot of hobbies quickly, I will kill you. And she meant it.

And because he was hanging, he was hanging around her all the time and she did not like it.

Yeah, I bet though he was probably thinking. What’s happening here? What, What, what? Yeah. Like what, what am I doing? Why, what? I need to be busier. I’ve heard people say that, you know, the, the finding purpose thing is really big, you know, and when you’ve, when you’ve had a job in a rewarding career, uh, and then you transfer into retirement.

Like, I ask people all the time who are retired, what’s your tip? What’s your advice and, ’cause I’m, I’m curious, like everybody’s different perspective and one person was saying that they sort of felt they had to have something every day that they could say, I did something of worth or note today.

It doesn’t have to be big, but I, it got me thinking that, that, that resonated. That’s one of the pieces of, of advice that really resonated with me.

My father, I think, struggled with being a leader all of his life, and then all of a sudden you don’t have any followers. And I think that that really created a void and he did a really good job over about a 12 to 24 month period of filling it in. But I’ve had friends who were surgeons. A judge, those people have had a lot of trouble transitioning to retirement because they identified themselves to a large extent by their job.

They enjoyed it, the challenges, the impact and everything else. And as you say, all of a sudden you don’t have that and people aren’t necessarily asking for your opinion. All of that is tricky. It takes time. I think people should do a little more reading and as you say, you had thought it through ahead of time.

I did think it through ahead of time, but it was kind of, it was funny. I spent like 27 years for the Globe and Mail telling people about retirement, and I did actually absorb enough to help me.

Navigate it. Uh, ’cause I would’ve been pathetic if I didn’t. Um, but I, I’ve, I did a lot of thinking about it and I urge people to do that too.

I mean, I recently wrote a Substack piece about, you know, some things people should be doing about five years ahead of their targeted retirement data. One of them is thinking, what the heck am I gonna do when I’m retired? It isn’t, you know, some people, some people sort of think it’s just gonna be an extended vacation and I really like my vacations, but you know, that gets old after a little while.

And so I think, I think, you know, the money aspect of retirement is so vital. It’s the underpinning the foundation. It basically sets you up and it gives you the freedom to think about what you wanna do, but it isn’t the day to day.

That has to be planned as well.

No, I couldn’t agree more.