Retirement: A Full-Time Job

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.

Related Posts:

    What do You Want to Be When You Grow Up?

    Filling in the Blank in Retirement

    Is Being Content Preventing You From Being Happy in 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.

Related Posts:

            Choosing Happiness

            Forget Your Troules, C’mon Get Happy

            Six Ways to Feel Happier, Be Healthier (From AARP)

 

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Filling in the Blank in Retirement

Our friend Jeff came over last week for dinner.  He just got a new job after a period of unemployment.  He’s happy to be working again, he told us, “I really like working.  You and Doug are really good at filling your days without work, but I had real trouble with that.”

I thought about that for a second and told him that actually, we all have the same 24 hours in a day to fill, so really, he did fill the time when he wasn’t working.  It’s just that he didn’t fill it with something ___________ enough.  I asked him what that blank was for him. 

For Jeff, the thing he loves about work is the problem-solving.  He develops customized database applications tailored to the unique business needs of his clients.  His whole day is filled with a series of problems that need to be solved, and he is engaged all day long in solving them, like puzzles.  He loves this about his work.

I love the days that I don’t work, I have no trouble filling them, it’s true.  But one thing I’ve learned about myself, just from adding a few hours of work each week, is that I like doing things that are a little bit hard for me, just a little out of my comfort zone.  In retirement, I don’t really do things outside of my comfort zone because, well, I’m not comfortable doing them.  I get to choose whatever I want to do, and so I tend toward things that are easy.

But at work I have to do a few things that don’t feel comfortable to me, things that I wouldn’t really do if I didn’t have to, like meeting with people I don’t know, or choosing the right insurance coverage, or sorting through the provisions of complex legal agreements.  But after I do it, I feel good about myself that I had it in me to figure it out.  Getting out to an office, even for only a few hours each week, also gives me a little social outlet that I’m not getting when I’m home writing, working in my garden, reading, or exercising.     

Neither of these things has to do with money.  That’s the thing about retirement.  When you leave your job, it’s not just the salary you are leaving behind.  You are leaving behind other things that you may have enjoyed, things that may have engaged and fulfilled you.  In retirement, you have to figure out what it is besides money that you got from your job and find a way to get that on your own.  Of course you’ll need to accumulate an adequate nest egg to retire.  But having enough money will not be enough to fill your days in a way that makes you feel fulfilled; you’re going to need to find something that is ___________ enough.

Related Posts:

    What Do You Want to Be When You Grow Up?

    Figuring Out a New Person to Be

    The Truth About Retirement:  Part II

 

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For the Secret to a Happy Retirement Ask a Woman

Women generally arrive at retirement with smaller nest eggs.  That’s due to a number of factors, including lower lifetime earnings and the fact that they tend to invest less aggressively than men.  While women have historically been less confident about their investing abilities, that’s beginning to change according to the 2011 Scottrade American Retirement Survey.  Sixty-nine percent of the women in the survey rated their ability to plan for retirement as good or very good, inching closer each year to this year’s 71 percent of men.

And since women have longer life expectancies than men, they will need even bigger nest eggs to carry them through retirement.  Which reminds me of the joke:  Why do husbands die before wives?  Because they want to.  I get it, but maybe it’s time for the men to learn something from the women:  How to achieve a happy retirement.  Besides a longer life-expectancy, women do have some advantages in this area.  That’s the subject of my post last week at U.S. News and World Report What Men Can Learn From Women About Retirement.  

 

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Happy People Save More Money

We've all read the studies that show that beyond a certain income level, wealth has little effect on happiness.  But according to recent research, the reverse seems not to be the case.  Happiness levels do seem to have an impact on peoples' savings habits, with happy people saving more money than the rest.  Intuitively, this makes sense to me, often when I'm spending money unnecessarily, it's because I'm self-medicating for other areas of my life I'm unhappy with.  

The research also showed that people that held a positive view on aging and retirement saved more for retirement than those with a negative view.  Again, this makes sense to me, if you are dreading retirement, it would be pretty hard to be motivated to set money aside for it year after year.

More on this topic at my U.S. News post, Happy People Save More Money for Retirement.

After last week's post about finding health insurance in retirement, I received lots of questions about affordable health insurance options.  I've put that all together in my post this week at U.S. News, How to Save Money on Health Insurance.

Related Posts:

    Why Retirement Won't Make You Happy

    Happy Retirees Turn Off the TV

    More on Happiness

 

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What Are You Willing to Give Up?

I met a really fun woman this weekend that is contemplating retirement.  She’s in her mid-60’s, and is planning on retiring in a year or two.  She told us about a recent conversation she had with her husband.  They realize they will have to give up some extravagances in retirement, but couldn’t arrive at any that they were actually willing to live without.

I knew when I retired I was willing to give up a housecleaner and a gardener, I knew I was willing to downgrade the luxury level of our travel, and at some point down the road, sell our vacation home.  When you work, you enjoy the luxury of a steady paycheck.  Which means you can pay people to take care of a lot of the things you don’t have time to do because you are busy working.  It means you can make your travels spectacular because you only get 3 weeks of them.  When you work, you can buy a little bits of time with money.

I listened to my new acquaintance as she went through the list of all the things she wasn’t willing to give up.  I was trying to think of something substantial to add to the conversation, something that maybe she hadn’t thought of that would be easy for her to give up, and my mind drew a blank.  Despite the fact that we spend three-quarters of what we spent before I retired, I couldn’t remember what it was that we had given up.  I couldn’t think of anything I was missing.

It just occurred to me this morning, that’s because what I really wanted before I retired was time.  I was willing to buy it, a lot more of it.  And if you aren’t craving that time, I mean really craving it, you will probably feel like that time costs too much.  It costs you a fashionable wardrobe, or luxury cars, or some manual labor.  It costs you a star or two on hotel rooms, or some legroom on a flight, or the latest iPad.   And if you didn’t actually crave that time to begin with, you might just wind up resenting all the gadgets you’re giving up.

Related Posts:

            How to Stretch a Travel Dollar in Retirement

            Downsizing to Retirement

            Downsizing to Recession

 

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Why Retirement Won't Make You Happy

So it turns out I’ve been using the wrong word.  I’ve written about the connection between happiness and good health, how to increase your happiness by practicing gratitude, and how spending money on experiences makes us happier than spending money on stuff.  I didn’t mean to use the word happy.   What I was really referring to was eudaimonic well-being.  You probably thought I meant hedonic well-being.   I know, I know, why didn’t I just say so?

Hedonic well-being is the fleeting type of happiness you feel when you get upgraded to first class or the Giant’s win the World Series.  It’s the euphoria you experience driving home after your last day of work en route to the first day of the rest or your life:  retirement.  That’s not the happiness to which I refer when I speak of happiness.  In fact, the constant pursuit of hedonic well-being is part of the reason that people aren’t happier, and by happy I mean eudaimonic, I mean if that really is a word.

According to the Wall Street Journal (thanks for that link Ram), “ ‘Eudaimonia’ is a Greek word associated with Aristotle and often mistranslated as ‘happiness’—which has contributed to misunderstandings about what happiness is.”  So it’s not just me.  Researchers at the University of Wisconsin say the key to achieving eudaimonic happiness, the kind that is important to physical health, is to have a sense of purpose to your life. 

Any happy retiree doesn’t need Aristotle to tell them that.  According to the studies:

“Some of the newest evidence suggests that people who focus on living with a sense of purpose as they age are more likely to remain cognitively intact, have better mental health and even live longer than people who focus on achieving feelings of happiness.”

And by feelings of happiness, they mean hedonic well-being.  

Retirement won’t make you happy.  Retirement isn’t a purpose, it’s a goal.  Once you achieve it, you’ve got to find your new purpose.  Feeling a sense of purpose may have been easy when you were raising kids or running a business, but in retirement, you’ve got to find that new thing that rings your bell.  If you’re going to be retired for decades, chances are, that’s not just one thing but a series of things.

With most of us yearning for that day when we can finally escape the rat race, it can come as a shock that after the honeymoon phase, the hedonic happiness fades, the novelty wears off, and now the work begins, figuring out what will make you happy.  And by happy I mean eudaimonic.

 

Totally Unrelated Post:

Why Pessimism is Good for Your Retirement  (My latest post over at U.S. News & World Report)

 

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Do We Really Want Everything We Want?

I read The Millionaire Next Door over a decade ago.  That book had a big impact on the way I think about money and my own dreams for retirement.  One of the things I was most fascinated with in the book was the study into what happens to children of millionaires as they move into adulthood.  Despite growing up with wealth, not all the children of the millionaires in the book grew up to be happy, responsible adults. 

Some of the millionaires felt they had worked so hard for their money, they wanted their children to have it a bit easier.  They gave their kids just about everything they could ever want and continued to support them long after they flew the nest.  On average, those kids didn't do so well for themselves as adults.  However, the kids of millionaires that just received the basics, including whatever education they wanted to pursue, did much better, growing into well-adjusted, self-reliant adults.

I remember when I was about 14 or 15, I had my eye on a stereo system that was on sale at, of all places, Thrifty's drugstore.  For $89 I would get the tuner, turntable and speakers.  That was a lot of money but I was determined, saving my allowance and baby-sitting money until I had enough.  It took me six weeks to save enough.  Two things happened during that six weeks.  First, the store kept reducing the price so that by the time I had enough money, it was only $59.  Second, I spent six weeks dreaming about getting that stereo.  It felt so good when I finally walked down to that store and made my purchase.

I probably wouldn't even remember that stereo now if my parents had simply bought it for me when I first started lusting after it.  It meant something to me to have saved and dreamed about it, so much that I still remember it today.  There's something important about dreaming and working for what you want.  

There's also something important about not getting everything you want.  Tim wrote a great post this week about not really wanting everything we want.  It wouldn't be fun, and it wouldn't mean anything if we just got everything we wanted.  And that applies to how many people approach retirement:

"They plan to have everything they want in their retirement.  They want two trips a year, a summer cottage, a bigger boat…and so on.  They build a fantasy of what they think they want, but here is the kicker: the don’t even really want it.  They just think they do."

It's a great post, be sure to go read the rest of it.

Related Posts:

    Enough is Enough

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    How Much Money Do You Need to Feel Rich?

 

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How to Fit in Without Kids

 

I’ve recently become addicted to the TV show, Dexter.  For those of you that don’t know, Dexter is a serial killer, but really, a very likable guy.  Being a serial killer in a mostly law-abiding society isn’t easy.  Dexter has to work hard to study social norms so he can fit in with the non-killers.  Part of the fun of the show is watching how he learns the basics of fitting into society. 

If you decide not to have children, you’re also going to have to learn how to fit in to a world that doesn’t understand you.  When people find out that you don’t want kids, be prepared for their shock.  But take comfort in the fact that it’s not as bad as their reaction would be if they found out you were secretly a serial killer.  For those of you that stumbled on to my blog, not because of retirement, but because of my post and radio spot on not having kids, here are a few tips for fitting in without kids.

1)   Take a genuine interest in the kids of your friends and family.  It’s the center of their universe.  To be part of their universe, you need to appreciate all the parts of their lives, that means their kids, too.  Remember, you can have as much fun with them as you want and then you get to leave them there at the end of the evening.

2)   Don’t tell stories about how a kid kicked your airplane seat the whole way from San Francisco to New York, or how you had a screaming baby at the booth next to you at dinner last night.  People will brand you a child-hater and you won’t fit in.

3)   Don’t talk about all those wonderful vacations you take to tropical resorts that don’t allow children, or bike trips you took through the French countryside.  Now you’re just rubbing it in.

4)   When people ask if you have kids, say, “No, we don’t,” and don’t volunteer that you didn’t actually want them.  They will feel better thinking that you couldn’t have them rather than that you are rejecting their lifestyle outright.  Plus they might feel sorry for you and be even nicer to you.

5)   And finally, never ever give reasons when they ask you why you never had them.  You are just asking for them to barrage you with all the reasons you should have.  Better to say, “we just never wanted them,” and remain an enigma.  If you give reasons, you risk offending them with all the reasons you like your life so much exactly the way it is.

Related Posts:

            What Not Having Kids Have to do with Retirement?

            My Path to Retirement

            Retirement:  Reflections on Choosing a Career

 

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Sydney Gets Her Groove Back

It’s 3:30 Friday afternoon.  I have a zit, my nails look like crap, and I haven’t worked out in a week.  I haven’t experienced this trio of circumstances in over three years, not since before I retired.  It used to be the normal state of affairs this time of year, the time of year accountants call busy season.

I’m sitting at my desk at my supposed-to-be-part-time consulting gig after having worked about 50 hours that week.  I glance at my lipstick-smudged teacup and realize my lips must look like crap too.   I switched the teakettle on about two hours ago but forgot to go fill my cup, my stomach is growling, and I have to pee--another thing I’ve been putting off for the last hour.  I’m answering questions for auditors, revising spreadsheets, and pulling together tax data.  

It’s busy season.  Everything I thought I hated about my old job.  The number one reason I retired.  Oddly enough I’m feeling nothing but pure but joy.

Rewind to exactly six years ago, to the busy season that killed my joy.  In the midst of that year’s tax season, my controller had to start her maternity leave early, the baby arrived six weeks before her due date.  To say I was unprepared for that possibility would be an understatement.  Busy season 2005:  the absolute worst tax season of my career.  I really did lose my joy that year.  My two best friends noticed, my husband noticed, practically everyone noticed.

After the workload let up, my joy never returned.  That busy season was malignant.  I never was able to reverse the damage it did to my job satisfaction.  The fondness I felt for that job for the previous 15 years had evaporated.  I thought it would return.  I waited.  But over the next 2 years, the wound never healed.  I had to get my joy back, it was infecting the rest of my life.

I have no idea when it actually happened over these last three years of my retirement, but somewhere along the line, I got my joy back.  Having control of my time, engaging in activities that are meaningful to me, and spending time with the people I love without the stresses of work life, it all propelled me toward joy.

The pimple, and the scraggly nails, and the guilt from skipping out on my workouts notwithstanding, it took that little event:  sitting at a desk at 3:30 on a Friday afternoon after a really busy work week, to show me the contrast from the same season six years earlier.  I have my joy back.

Related Posts:

            My Last Day at Work

            Retirement Nightmares

            Retirement and the Magic Number

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