Retirement: A Full-Time Job

How You Know that You've Found Your Passion

I was in Hawaii last week, don’t ask, it rained almost the whole time.  It was still fun because we were there with fun friends.  We all made the best of it.  But part of me did wonder why I was spending so much money to be somewhere else when the weather was so much better back at home.   

It used to be that the only part of traveling that I didn’t like was that I missed my doggy back home.  I worried about her.  Oh and guilt, I had much of that too, worry and guilt.  Toward the end of those past trips, I got more and more anxious to get back home to make sure she was ok.  I was always so happy to see that everything was fine when I got home.  Although after greeting me joyfully, she would catch herself and move to ignoring me for several hours just to remind me how mad she was that we left her.  I did mention the guilt, right?  Those Beagles are clever.

I have to admit that trips have been much more enjoyable over the last several years since we haven’t had a furry friend back home to worry about.  Even though our days back home outnumber those on the road, this has been my biggest hurdle to adopting another dog. 

But on this trip, I had another yearning for home, even before it started raining.  I missed my piano.  Really, I had piano withdrawals.  So I downloaded “Music Theory for Dummies” onto my iPad so I could still do something that felt like learning the piano.  That made it worse.  I just wanted to practice everything I was learning about building chords.  To hear what some of the minor scales sounded like on the piano, I used Garage Band on my computer.   Since I’ve been home, I’ve been practicing about three or four hours a day.  It’s all I want to do.

So now I’m thinking that my passion for travel has been overtaken by my passion for piano.  And if I’m not as hot on travel anymore, if I just want to be home with my piano, then maybe it’s ok to get a dog too.  

I guess I'll have more time to reflect on which passions pull hardest when we spend a month in New York this summer.  But in the meantime, a reader sent me this picture of his best friend.  I know, who could resist that face, right?  So yes, it is making me seriously consider his advice to just "get the puppy!"  

Related Posts:

    What's on Your Bucket List?

    What Five Things Make You Most Happy (and Why Aren't You Doing Them?)

    Enjoying Retirement with Doggies

 

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(Photo credit:  Thanks to Kirk B. for the temptation!)

 

What's on Your Bucket List?

Before I retired, I admit I pretty much only pictured myself being involved in two activities, one being travel and the other being not working. 

I never really had a bucket list, you know, one of those lists of things I wanted to be sure to get through before I died.  Even on the travel part, it’s not like I have a list of places I have to see before I die.  I figure I won’t get to them all anyway, so I’ll just go to the place that appeals to me at the moment.  Maybe because someone’s offered me a home exchange, maybe because I see a great deal on the internet, or maybe because friends ask us to tag along.  In any case, I’m ok with leaving much of the world unexplored.

But I think travel and not working commonly top the list of activities many soon-to-be-retirees focus on, that and maybe golf.

A few months ago, I read an article about a financial planner that goes through a bucket list approach for his retirement planning clients.   His view is that if he can get his clients to really picture how they want to be spending their time in retirement, he can help them figure out how much money they would need to make that life a reality.  It sounds like his clients are a lot like me.  It’s hard for an advisor to help clients figure out how much they need for retirement when their primary goal is just to not work.

So he starts by asking clients to picture how they would like to live their lives if they knew they only had 20 years left to live, then five years, then one year.  Twenty years seems like enough time to get really good at the piano and travel leisurely as the opportunity arises.  So I’ve got that covered.  If I knew I only had five years to live, I would definitely want a dog in my life.  I keep thinking about it, but since I feel like I have more like 50 years left, I keep putting that one off.  But it’s a good thing to keep in the back of my mind.  I’m sure I’ll have a dog waking me up in the morning in the not-too-distant future.

If I only had one year left though, I probably wouldn’t spend a whole lot of time traveling.  Instead, I’d probably try to spend as much time with friends and family as possible.  Maybe I’d be more inclined to travel if it involved traveling with friends or family. 

It’s a pretty interesting exercise to think about your bucket list in this fashion, breaking it down to specific time periods.  Looks like the only thing I’m missing from my bucket list is a canine companion.  But I’m hoping there’s still plenty of time for that.  So right now I’m on my way to Hawaii, excited to spend some quality time with fun-loving friends.

Related Posts:

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            Retirement Planning:  It's Not All About the Money

 

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(Photo details:  Mauna Lani, Hawaii)

 

Improvising Retirement

Oh my poor neglected blog.  I've been obsessed with my new hobby, at the expense of my old one.  I’m spending every spare moment at the piano.  I wake up in the middle of the night humming songs in my head.  In some ways, playing the piano is much easier than blogging.  With piano, you just play the notes that are already printed on the page.  With blogging, it’s up to you to figure out what to put on that blank page.

But last week it was that already printed page of my piano book that frustrated me.  I was learning “At Last,” a song which should be full of soul, think Etta James.  The simple arrangement in my beginner piano book was competing with the Etta James version playing in my head.  I tried to play what was playing in my head instead of what was written on the page, but my piano skills just aren’t advanced enough yet to achieve that sound.   So all I achieved was frustration.

I explained this to my piano teacher last week at my therapy session, I mean my piano lesson.  His diagnosis was that I’m ready to start learning how to improvise.  He sent me home with the bare bones version of “Autumn Leaves.”  It’s a page from what is known as a “fake book,” something I had only just recently learned about from my piano-playing uncle, aka, play-a-hymn-any-hymn-Jim.  Jim spent his childhood piano career accompanying parishioners at Sunday morning services.  He was the son of a preacher man, my grandpa.

My uncle gave up the piano several years ago when his arthritis made it impossible to keep it up.  But before that, he would entertain his fellow Rotarians with old standards at their weekly meetings.  Before he gave up his beautiful baby grand piano, he asked my cousins and me whether any of us wanted it.  I regret to report that we all turned him down.  So he gave it to the music department at U.C. Berkeley.  How I wish I could play that decision over again.

Anyway, he did keep his mountains of piano books and sheet music.  I just popped over there last week and combed through his stash.  In the piles of paper were these fake books.  I only took one of them because I didn’t really understand what they were and I couldn’t make any sense them.   The songs are really just skeletons—the melody notes, chord notations, and lyrics.  It’s up to the musician to improvise exactly how to play it. 

So now I understand.  And I’m having so much fun learning how to fill in the blanks, adding what’s in my head to what’s on the page.  Just as much fun as I had when I first started writing what’s in my head onto the blank page, or blank blog screen as the case may be.

When I retired, I had no idea how much I would enjoy blogging or how much of my time would revolve around writing.  I knew I wanted to pick up the piano again, but I never thought it would take me five years to get to it.  And after I retired, I certainly didn't think I’d ever be interested working in my old field again, even part-time.  But now I know that retirement is part advance planning and part live improvisation.  And if you're comfortable with improvising, you're going to have a lot more fun.

(Several readers have made the great suggestion that I include a little description of the photos that I include in my blog posts.  The photo above is Rasheed and the Jazz Collective at Washington Square Park in New York City's Greenwich Village.) 

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Are You a Failure at Retirement?

 

Ok, now that we’ve talked about what literally gets us out of bed in the morning, alarms, annoying dogs, boot camp, and of course having to pee, let’s talk about what gets you out of bed in that way that RJ was referring to when he commented that “new challenges” get him out of bed.  Or as Steve, Suzanne, and the other Steve agreed, having control over their days, planning them out exactly as they want to live them.

It may be hard for some of us to understand why someone doesn’t really want to retire.  And it may be hard for others to understand why some of us do want to retire.  But the one I’m trying to reach right now, is the one that really does want to retire, but then doesn’t actually like it when he gets there. 

As I mentioned in my last post, most retirement planning literature focuses exclusively on the math part of the equation.  How much money do you need?  How should you invest it?  And then once you get to retirement, how much of it can you afford to spend?  But what about the how to live your life part?

I read a couple really good books on the subject before I retired, How to Retire Happy, Wild, and Free and What Color is your Parachute? For Retirement.  I made all the lists.  Lists of activities I would take up in retirement, tasks I wanted to accomplish, organizations I wanted to volunteer for, and ideas on how I might structure my days.

My list of activities included trying skiing again, making my own clothes, and playing the piano.  My to-do list included painting all the rooms of my house, cleaning out my closets, and finally getting some old photos in albums.  My volunteer calling would be with doggies. 

Now, five years later, I haven’t tried skiing, I’ve made only one skirt, and I finally just called a piano teacher yesterday to set up lessons.  I’ve made a very small dent in the painting, closets, and photo albums.  My current volunteer job has nothing to do with dogs, and I only started it a few months ago.  And I avoid structuring my days as much as possible.

So my point is, all is not lost if you failed to plan for this before you retired.  Chances are you’ll feel differently after you retire anyway.  And the good news is you have plenty of time to figure it out after you retire.  You may even want to enjoy a few months of just relishing the fact that you are not working anymore before you figure it out.  Go ahead and relish, like I said, you have plenty of time.

But eventually, you’re going to need some reason to get out of bed in the morning, and now I mean that in a way that means more than just to get your coffee.  I mean that in a “new challenges” kind of way, as our wise commenter RJ mentioned.

Here are some ideas to get you started:

Take some classes.  When I retired five years ago, my going-away present was an Apple MacBook.  Up to that point I was a PC gal.  So I took weekly classes at the Apple store to learn how to use my new machine. 

After that, I took a memoir writing class, a magazine writing class, a blog writing class, and some creative non-fiction writing classes.  I took a class about angel investing and another on photography.  And as I mentioned, I’ll be starting piano lessons soon.  Explore as many topics as you might be interested in.

Try a new hobby.  I took all those writing classes because I started a blog after I retired.  I read Blogging for Dummies and then I set up a blog.  I barely knew what a blog was before I retired.  Now it’s my favorite way to spend time.

Return to some old hobbies.  It took me awhile, but I finally got back to yoga.  I join Doug on his bike rides from time to time.  And while I don't do much sewing, I found I loved knitting.  I can only make baby blankets so far, but luckily quite a few of my friends had babies over the last five years. 

Pick up a part-time or volunteer job.  I know it sounds counter-intuitive for retirement, but I really enjoyed my part-time retirement job.  Mine was in my old field, but maybe there’s something you’ve always wanted to try that wasn’t what you did for a living.  I’ve often thought it would be fun to work in the tasting room of a winery or in a doggy daycare.  I figure since the doggies there already have owners, it would be safer than volunteering at the shelter.  Too tempting, and I’m not ready for another dog quite yet!

Travel.  It doesn’t have to be expensive.  When you’re retired you can take advantage of last-minute deals you might not have had the flexibility for when you were working.  I save money by exchanging my home on vacations.  It’s a little more challenging to set up, but since I’m retired, I have the time to devote to it.  Kind of makes me feel like I have second homes all over the world.  And if you travel to another country, you can take on the challenge of brushing up on a foreign language before you go.

Train for a physical challenge.  Most of the year I get moderate exercise just about every day.  But every August, we bike in a community fund-raising ride.  It’s only 31 miles, but it gets me out on a bike pretty regularly before ride day to get ready. 

For you fitness junkies, maybe following Tamara’s lead training for marathons is more up your alley.  Having a physical goal not only gives you a challenge to wake up to, you’ll get healthier in the process.

I don't mean to minimize those wonderful retirement activities like napping, reading, and enjoying more time with friends and family.  But finding your own reason to jump, or meander, out of bed each morning is key to creating a retirement that you’ll love for decades to come.

 

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How to Recapture Your Retirement-High

I recently wrote that people may feel bored in retirement simply because they are overwhelmed by the unlimited number of choices they now face.  Immobilized by fear of choosing the wrong thing, they choose nothing at all and wind up bored.  

But there is another culprit responsible for boredom in retirement:  hedonic adaptation.  Maybe you never experienced boredom when you first retired.  Maybe you basked in the freedom to go to the movies in the middle of the day or linger over lunch with a friend.  Maybe you relished the general absence of hurrying.  But at some point, the novelty wore off.  Even though you’re doing those same things that used to make you happy, they just don’t seem to make you happy anymore.  Now they are just normal.

Hedonic adaptation is that phenomenon that eventually brings you back to earth after experiencing a positive life change like winning the lottery, getting married, or retiring.  After an initial period of euphoria, you eventually get used to your newfound riches of money, love, or time, and return to the level of happiness you enjoyed before the positive event. 

Yesterday’s New York Times had a great article about how hedonic adaptation applies to love and marriage.  According to the article, we are “biologically hard-wired to crave variety.   Variety and novelty affect the brain in much the same way that drugs do — that is, they trigger activity that involves the neurotransmitter dopamine, as do pharmacological highs.”

So how do you recapture the high that you enjoyed right after you retired?   Well, you’re going to have to change it up a bit.  The same old same old isn’t going to cut it.  You’ve got to introduce some variety, and for those that are going to be retired for decades, you’re going to have to do this over and over again.  

The key is to balance what makes you feel good with what makes you feel good about yourself.

I recently volunteered to join the finance committee of an educational non-profit in my community.  It’s a novel experience for me and I’m kind of learning as I go along.  But I'm getting a charge from meeting new people and from being part of something that is doing such great work to help kids and their teachers.  On the days that I’m engaged with the group, I feel good about myself.

I’ve also gotten back into my yoga routine.  While you might think this is an activity that feels good, it doesn’t feel good until it’s over.  It would only be a slight exaggeration to equate it to torture.  Bikram Yoga is practiced in an extremely hot studio and the 26 poses are very challenging.  I find myself constantly negotiating the line between working hard enough to get the benefits, but not so hard that I throw up.  On days that I go to yoga, I feel good about myself.

And while housework and yard work are not really activities that make me feel good, I sure do feel good about myself when I manage to tackle a little bit each day.

It’s not just about finding new things that make you feel good.  Taking a nap in the middle of the day, enjoying lunch with a friend, or reading a good book--these are all things that make you feel good.  They contribute to your hedonic well-being.  But to get that retirement high back, you're also going to have to include things that contribute to your eudaimonic well-being.  That’s why my favorite days in retirement have been the ones where I find the perfect balance between activities that make me feel good, and activities that make me feel good about myself.

 

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Am I Better Off than I Was Four (and One-Half) Years Ago?

Wow, I guess transporting retirement back home didn’t turn out to be that hard.  I’m shocked, shocked to see that I haven’t posted to my blog in weeks.  It seems that aliens (or more accurately politics—same thing I guess) have sped up time because I've also been back from New York for weeks and it feels like I just got home yesterday.   I guess the best way to describe retirement this time around is that it’s like liquid.  Once the tap got turned on, it just flowed in and filled every single crevice of life.  No need to worry about filling that white space.

I’ve been getting a lot of email lately from folks just entering retirement and struggling with getting their footing.  By the way, I love getting all your emails and I always answer those, even when it seems from the blog that I’ve dropped off the face of the earth.  So keep ‘em coming!

To refresh your collective memories, I retired in March of 2008.  Four and one-half years ago.  After two and a half years, I waded back into work, part-time.  As of two months ago, I am officially re-retired.  Full time retired.

I have learned a few things from this on-again-off-again retirement approach.

First, adjusting to retirement is not really as easy as you would think.  Even if you are lusting after retirement like I was in the years leading up to mine, well, it’s just a really big change.  I was so happy to be retired that I didn’t really think of it as hard until now, when I look back.  And the reason is that this time, it’s been really, really, really easy.

Because I know now exactly what to expect.  And because when I was working again, I yearned for all the things that I had taken for granted when I was fully retired.  Because when I stopped working this time, I knew that you shouldn’t force what comes next, you should just let it evolve naturally.  You should just let it ooze into all the crevices of your new life.

Of course, it helped to turn retirement on again by heading to the Center of the Universe for a month.  New York always wakes me up.  But I can’t even pinpoint what it is I’ve been doing over the last several weeks since I’ve been back home.  Just spending time with all the people I missed while I was gone, as well as with the garden that didn’t take a vacation from growing.   Getting back to my regular exercise routine and actually having time to read books and follow politics.  What will I do when I finally finish the photo book of my trip?  I don’t know.  But I do know that I don’t have to know.

Yes, I’m better off than I was four and one-half years ago.   This time I’ve got this whole retirement thing down.

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Picturing Retirement: 27 Happy Years

(Posted in Photo Fridays)

Last week on a cross-town bus headed for Grand Central Station, we sat in front of three chatty ladies, probably in their late 70's.  One of the golden girls commented that she had been happily married for seven years.

"But honey, you were married for 47 years!"

"Yeah, but you asked how many years I was happily married.  If you add up those days, it all adds up to seven years."

Doug and I just celebrated our 20th anniversary this week at this colorful spot on Shelter Island.  Since we were together for seven years before we got married, I always think of it in the opposite direction.  If you add up all those days, it feels like I've been happily married for 27 years.

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Advice from a Retiree to a College Student

I just got back from a visit with my youth. 

Every year or two, Doug and I like to get down to Santa Barbara to replace our fraying UCSB sweatshirts.  As we make the five-hour drive, the memories creep back.  When I get a whiff of that tar in the air, I know campus is close.  Oh that smell of salty ocean air mixed with tar, I love it so.  Nothing brings back the memories like that oily scent of tar.

The memories.  My first drive down there with Kim, our boxes packed to the sunroof of my Volkswagen, the two of us belting along with Hall and Oates.  Econ 101, Professor Watson, bad grades.  My view of the sunrise over the ocean from my top bunk in San Miguel Dorm.   (Google it, it really did face east AND the ocean.)  Procrastination, guilt, and did I mention bad grades?

What ever happened to my ex-boyfriend, my ex-roommate, my abandoned bike?  Why didn’t I take more walks on the beach, try golf class, or study harder?  And the biggest question of all, why did I spend four years at one of the loveliest spots on earth yearning for it to be over so I could get on to living my “real” life?

Really, I did.   I couldn’t wait to get out, school felt like such a waste of time to me.  I loved working at my part-time jobs:  as a secretary at a law office, as a staff accountant at an accounting firm, and in HR for the 1984 Summer Olympics.  I hated the map room gig and my short stint at the title company, but even those felt real, like I was actually doing something, not just studying to do something someday.

So why, when I walk around campus, am I jealous of the students?  Why do I wish I could be them?  Get a chance to do it all over again and savor it?  A chance to do it without the guilt, the guilt of not studying enough.  A chance to let myself have fun without agonizing that I should have been studying instead.

Because grown-up Sydney has some perspective to share with college-student Sydney:  It doesn’t matter that you will graduate with a 2.97 GPA.  You will go on to have a successful career in finance, a happy marriage to your college sweetheart, and get this, to retire by the time you turn 44.  So go ahead, just enjoy it!

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Another Retirement Formula

After you are comfortable that you have enough money saved to retire, the decision as to when to actually pull the trigger really boils down to a simple formula:

            When (value of remuneration from job) > (value of your time) = Work

            When (value of your time) > (value of remuneration from job) = Retire

Notice I do not not use the word money.

People work for a variety of reasons, more reasons than just the money.  However, since most people actually need money to live on, that reason can obscure those other reasons.  I do know a few people that have enough money to retire but don’t want to.  Because they receive other rewards that they find more valuable than the extra time that they would receive if they retired.

For some people those rewards might be challenge, or appreciation, or structure.  For others it might be the feeling of contributing, of being part of a team, or social reasons.  And for many it’s identity.  You are giving up all those things when you retire, and if you are not yearning for the time, you will most certainly miss those things, and probably the money too. 

Which is why my part-time consulting gig has been so great for me, because I got a chance to have all those rewards and still have so much time available to me, just for myself.  I knew when I started this gig, I even said so in my interview, that at some point the job would grow and they would need to get a full-time person.  I also told them that I would not be tht person.  Because despite the value of the many rewards I receive, I’m not willing to give up more time to get more of the rewards.

My part-time gig is about to cross that line for me, where it would require more time, time that I find too valuable to trade for the various forms of remuneration.  I love the appreciation, the feeling of contributing, and yes, the extra money.  But I’m not willing to give up any more of my time—it’s too valuable.  More valuable than those other things are to me.

So I’m going to be passing the reins to my full-time replacement once we figure out whom that will be.  I broke the news a few weeks ago.   It was hard and sad, and since I had been stressing about that conversation for months now, a bit of a relief.  I have loved being part of that team, and I will miss it.  But I have learned that I am open to this kind of thing again in the future.  For now though, I’m just appreciating the value of the wealth of time that will come with the return to full-time retirement.

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Heaven on Earth

Posted in Happiness

I saw this movie a while ago called Wristcutters:  A Love Story.  I’m not recommending it, it really wasn’t that good.  But on this day, the day that I contemplate what I’m most thankful for, I thought of this movie.

It’s set in a surreal afterlife where the people that commit suicide wind up, stay with me here.  This afterlife doesn’t look like heaven or hell; it’s just a place that looks a lot like our normal life, except that everything is just ok.  The pizza tastes ok, your apartment is just ok, your job is just ok--not terrible but not wonderful either.  Just ok.  Even the cinematography adds to the view that everything is kind of blah.

Even though that movie was technically a love story, and not really a lesson on how we should live our lives, I went away with a lesson anyway.  It occurred to me that lots of people live the life they have right now like that Wristcutter’s afterlife, viewing everything as not good enough.  Not terrible but not great either.  

I happen to think the life I’m living is pretty much heaven.  I’m making the most of it because I think of it as a great gift, and I'm grateful for it.  Whether or not you believe that there is another life after this, why not be sure to enjoy this one, appreciate it, relish it.  You know, just in case.

Hoping you all have a wonderful holiday enjoying the company of the ones you love.

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