Interesting facts…….
Did you know that 60% of people who try to escape prison are caught within the first 24 hours and 85% within a week (Source: History Channel Americas Greatest Prison Breaks, History Channel 2016).
You may wonder why I’m sharing Alcatraz-like tales, but if you think about it for a minute, retirement and prison escapes are very similar.
You see, when people plan a prison escape, they are so focused on the act of getting out that they don’t do much planning for when they are finally beyond the walls. Which is when they realize they don’t have the tools, resources, and support that they need to stay on the run.
Similarly, many people are so focused on getting to the retirement finish line that they don’t plan for much beyond it.
The fact is, many people have little to no education about real-life retirement, and much of what people have been told or trained to think won’t help them make a meaningful transition.
Unfortunately, it’s so far off that it can make you feel unsettled or never truly free and peaceful..
My plan is to change that by giving retirement a much more personal look and a great understanding of what to expect and how to plan properly.
Fair warning! This is not fluffy, superficial information. This is real-life, hard-nosed insights and experiences that include a focus on solutions, not just information.
Right now, too much of the research and material out there is high-level and generalized. For example, many of the biggest financial firms attach their names and logos to the polls and studies being done by outside researchers.
The surveys do a nice job of identifying issues, but that’s where it ends. There’s no new training or educational workshops by most financial firms for their clients or local community or value-added services outside of traditional financial products.
They use the material to imply they care about more than your money, but if you go to their websites, you’ll only find what they want you to know about the financial products and services they sell.
So, at some point, we have to do something about the issues that have been identified and that won’t be resolved with more annuity or mutual fund sales.
As a result of this article and the software tools I have in my office, I can assure you that the biggest trend coming to the financial services industry will be two simple questions:
- Does your advisor talk about more than money?
- Do they have any verified training to back it up?
Because if they don’t, they are simply setting you up for a mere jail break.
To help facilitate change and reshape the narrative, we need to disrupt people’s thought patterns and get them off auto-pilot.
We need a little shock and awe. A ripping off of the proverbial band-aid to allow for new thoughts, ideas, and direction to formulate.
This is exactly what you are going to get with my Top 10 Things No One Tells You About Retirement.
These are little nuggets of knowledge, soundbites, and gemstones I have uncovered, and I am sharing to dramatically change everything you ever thought about retirement. So, without further ado, here they are:
1. Retirement Is Empty
2. Beware Of The Dark Side
3. The Wrong Top 10 List
4. Retirement Isn’t A Feeling
5. Up And Coming Subtractions
6. Retirement Doesn’t Eliminate Work
7. The Lost And Found Table
8. Life On The Back Burner
9. Stop Saying, “Retire To” Something
10. The Only Guarantee
1. Retirement is empty. That’s right, there’s nothing there. Retirement is a made-up, manufactured phase of life that doesn’t hold or contain anything. That means it’s up to you to fill it up with things that you value, want to do, and are important to you.
But here’s the catch, if you don’t fill it up yourself, other things will make their way into that space and time. Not knowing this and assuming your retirement bucket is full of good times and feelings is exactly why people struggle with the transition.
Research supports it:
- • 76% of retirees have seen someone struggle with the transition to retirement.
- • 43% of retirees reported that adjusting to retirement was harder than they expected and 45% said adjusting to it took longer than expected. (RCA 7)
The fact is, making the transition into retirement is not easy, and shouldn’t be considered natural. It goes against many of the beliefs and actions it took to get to that point in life.
So, you can’t just follow your natural thoughts and feelings or likes and dislikes. In other words, you can’t rely on your own understanding of what’s involved and what needs to be planned for.
2. Beware of the dark side. Your mental health should be a much higher priority to understand and manage than a stock market crash turning you into a homeless person.
It is reported that retired people are twice as likely to report feeling symptoms of depression than those who were still working, and the possibility of suffering from clinical depression goes up by about 40% after retiring.
Alcohol is the most used drug among older adults, with about 65% of people 65 and older reporting high-risk drinking.
Isolation is another scary factor that is often discussed. 25% of all seniors aged 60 and above report feeling isolated and lonely, and 43% can go days without talking to others and spend most of their time alone.
The point here isn’t to suggest that retirement is full of alcoholics, isolated, and depressed people or that you can’t enjoy an adult beverage or some extended time alone. But most human misery is not due to economic factors.
It’s worth noting, that the dark side of retirement doesn’t show up based on how much or how little money you have saved, but rather based on your mindset, daily actions, your health, and your relationships.
3. The wrong top 10 list. Many people don’t realize that retirement is one of the top 10 most stressful life events and that 20 of the 43 other stressful events can intersect directly with your retirement transition. To put it bluntly, it’s a minefield of change that can make you feel lost, out of sorts, and irrelevant.
The list comes from what is referred to as the Holmes and Rahe Stress Scale. Long story short, two psychiatrists Thomas Holmes and Richard Rahe surveyed 5,000 medical patients and found 43 life events that contributed to them becoming physically ill.
They labeled each of these events as a Life Change Unit (LCU) and gave each one a “weight” on the scale. Meaning, that some events are more stressful than others.
As you might expect, dealing with one or two of these factors can be challenging enough, but if several different layers or situations hit someone at the same time, it can create a downward spiral. Draining them along with their best-laid plans and dreams for what retirement was supposed to look and feel like.
Unfortunately, details like this never seem to make it into glossy brochures, TV commercials, or financial advisor conversations, but this is real life retirement.
4. Retirement isn’t a feeling. You can’t feel your way to and through retirement! The reality is, that a person’s overreliance on how they think they are going to feel instead of plans and actions to create those feelings can end up being problematic for their journey.
If we define feelings as an emotional response to what we think, see, and do, we can better understand how they can complicate the transition.
Early on we are trained to believe that retirement is a happy time of life that will automatically foster positive feelings because we finally achieved a goal that was set for us 30-40 years ago.
But feelings can be fleeting and unreliable. They are often shallow and short-term, meaning they can quickly change based on what we are doing, or not doing. It’s one reason I often hear new retirees say, “I thought everything was just right, but it feels all wrong.”
New retirees may say they are busier than ever, but most of their activity is meaningless. They feel less connected because they aren’t seeing family, friends, or former coworkers nearly as much as they thought.
It may be taking more effort than expected to get to the gym or an unexpected injury has them sidelined, and instead of having a positive impact by volunteering, they’re spending over half of their time watching TV and other videos.
Therefore, their actions or inactions aren’t producing “happy” or “good” feelings, so many people suffer in silence as they try to figure out why things look good on the outside but don’t feel right on the inside. The truth is, that retirement will never feel right unless people have concrete and specific plans to make it that way.
5. Up and coming subtractions. The retirement transition is extremely unbalanced in terms of the trade-offs between what you gain and lose. Yes, you gain time and freedom, but you also lose routine, direction, social connection, mental stimulus, physical activity, and influence to name a few.
It’s not uncommon for people to retire and grieve the loss of their career identity along with other things that work provided for them. Things they may have taken for granted and underappreciated that have now caused a void, leaving them feeling unsettled or disoriented. These are the very things that have defined us for years and given us identity, purpose, and direction.
You may not miss staff meetings, expense reports, or annual reviews at first. However, not understanding the mental, social, and physical value that work provides can cause people to doubt their decision to retire because they can’t fully comprehend why it doesn’t look or feel like they thought it should.
Finding replacements for the things we lose from the workplace isn’t always easy, but as you will see in the science of positive psychology it can help us better understand the significance of this trade-off and help prepare us to thrive in the transition rather than just survive.
6. Retirement doesn’t eliminate work. As people near retirement, they can conjure up the idea that they are done working. That all that hard work and sacrifice over the years has finally liberated them.
This is the wrong mindset because retirement doesn’t eliminate work, it re-orients it. Truth be told, retirement takes work! Instead of going to the office or doing certain tasks, new retirees still need to work on themselves, their health, relationships, identity, purpose, and more.
For example, learning how to say “No” to adult children or stopping a sibling from sabotaging an aging parent’s care. We have to work on dealing with physical changes, learning from mistakes, adopting new technology, regularly getting out of the house, meeting new people, and trying new things.
What’s important here is that you walk into retirement prepared to embrace the job requirements ahead rather than assume you’re on a permanent lunch break.
7. The lost and found table. Ever been to your kids or grandkids’ elementary school and seen the lost and found table? It’s littered with good stuff that doesn’t have a place.
It’s a moving metaphor for how people can feel if they don’t find a new tribe of people that fosters a sense of belonging and provides support.
We know from Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs that feeling loved and belonging are key psychological needs that we as humans desire and that doesn’t change simply because you’re retired.
But like that misplaced mitten, sock, or thermos, you can feel isolated and unwanted if you don’t take steps to connect with a new group of people in a similar stage of life.
Research suggests that active people with a strong social network are happier in retirement and have the ability to not only live longer but also delay the onset of health problems like heart disease, Alzheimer’s, and Dementia.
The other aspect of the lost and found table has to do with the opportunity to reunite with things you thought were gone. Throughout life we have all had favorite things to do, heights we aspired to, places we desired to see and be, as well as a sense of satisfaction we enjoyed.
But in the hustle and bustle of work, ferrying kids around, or helping others, pieces of them ended up lost in the shuffle … put on hold … or left behind.
Whether it’s an aspiration to play a musical instrument, join a theatre club, learn a second language, visit a distant country, support special needs families, or simply finish writing that book of poetry, retirement is the ideal time to return to the lost and found to reacquaint yourself with your desires before they’re permanently lost.
8. Life on the back burner. Many people see retirement as the ideal time to make up for the sacrifices they made to get there. They intend to spend more time with family, reconnect with friends, and get healthy again. But there can be an ugly catch to this approach.
Just because you now have time set aside and allocated to family and friends, doesn’t mean it will be reciprocated. Every sacrifice creates some collateral damage that more present time won’t immediately heal.
This is often the result of people being over-committed to their careers. They saw work as who they were, not just what they did. They loved their work but guess what, work can’t love you back.
Therefore, if you’re guilty of putting relationships, or your health on the back burner with the illusion that you will quickly rekindle and make up for lost time when you retire, well, don’t be surprised if you end up on the back burner yourself.
9. Stop Saying “Retire To” Something. Many people have reached retirement following some general guidelines and rules of thumb. Which can serve as initial guideposts that get us headed in the right direction, but over time need to be updated or replaced with more personal or specific plans and strategies
One such piece of advice is the idea that people need to “Retire To” something. This saying has become very common and cliché, and while it has some merit as a general suggestion, it misses the mark for a couple of reasons.
The issue is that it gives people permission to procrastinate or hold off on becoming the best possible version of themselves. This gets complicated by the fact that we are creatures of habit, and the act of retirement will not make us a better or different person.
Therefore, using what we know about human behavior, a better piece of advice is to “Retire With” something. In other words, instead of working out more, eating better, spending more time with family, or picking up an old instrument or other hobby when we get there, do it now.
It’s much easier to continue doing something (walking, eating healthy, taking an online class) than it is to suddenly start them. So please stop saying that people need to “Retire to something,” and replace it with the more relevant and insightful suggestion to “Retire with something!”
10. The only guarantee. Retirement’s only guarantee is that you will die at some point during it. On the surface, that sounds like the perfect conversation to avoid, but instead, I want you to flip the script and use it as a motivating factor.
You see, one of retirement’s biggest flaws is that people assume that once they get there, they have 20 or 30 years or more to do whatever they want whenever they want. But nothing could be further from the truth. None of us know how long we have.
Therefore, it’s more important than ever, to avoid putting off or delaying the things that are most important to you. It’s one reason I suggest people write down the things they don’t want to regret or miss not seeing or doing in this final stage of life.
Some of you may have seen this before, but it’s worth resharing. A hospice nurse collected and shared a list of things people said they had regretted as they neared the end of their lives.
They were:
I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me
I wish I hadn’t worked so hard
I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings
I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends
I wish that I had let myself be happier
My hope is that you can use retirement’s only guarantee to create a “no regrets retirement plan” that has a positive impact on you and those around you for years to come.
Overall, I hope my list of the Top 10 Things No One Ever Tells You About Retirement helps you see that there is no single, best way to plan for and live out your retirement.
Therefore, simply handing everyone the same playbook or script won’t work. We need to acknowledge both the unique factors and key differences in how people think, feel, and act. In order to help them apply what we know about retirement to their particular personality, preferences, and beliefs.
Please understand, that retirement isn’t changing, it already has. The train has left the station, so it’s more important than ever to get off auto-pilot and replace all the old and outdated information with a new more personal narrative.
Retirement doesn’t have to look or feel like a half-baked, jailbreak. It can be one of life’s greatest adventures where you get to decide and direct what you want it to be like.
Let me know how we can help, by answering any questions or providing some direction so you can plan, prepare and execute a life in retirment that you love.