The New Retirement Doesn't Start on a Friday

Series 3: Rethinking Retirement

Part 2: The New Retirement Doesn't Start on a Friday

For most of my working life, retirement was spoken about as though it happened on a particular day. You worked full-time for thirty or forty years, eventually reached the age or financial position you'd been aiming for, said goodbye to your colleagues on a Friday afternoon and woke up on Monday morning retired.

For some people, that still works perfectly well, particularly when they've been looking forward to retirement for years and already have a good idea of how they want to spend their time. The more conversations I've had with people approaching this stage of life, however, the more I've come to question whether such a sudden transition suits everyone.

In Part 1 of this series, I wrote about the possibility that some people who say they want to retire may actually be looking for something slightly different. They may want less pressure, greater flexibility and more control over their time rather than wanting to stop contributing altogether. Once you begin looking at retirement from that perspective, the idea of choosing one date and simply stopping starts to feel unnecessarily restrictive.

For many people, I think there is another possibility worth considering. Instead of treating retirement as the moment work ends, perhaps we can think about it as a period of transition in which work gradually occupies less space and the rest of life is given more room to grow.

Going From Five Days to Zero Is a Bigger Change Than It Looks

We tend to think about retirement primarily in financial terms, but work gives us far more than an income. Without really noticing it, a career creates structure around our days, gives us regular contact with other people and provides a reason to get up at a certain time and be somewhere. For people who have spent decades building businesses, managing teams or developing professional expertise, work can also become closely connected to how they see themselves.

That's why I've always found the traditional idea of retirement slightly curious. We spend years preparing financially for the day we stop working, yet considerably less time thinking about what it might feel like when something that has structured most of our adult life suddenly disappears.

I've seen people handle that transition extremely well because they already had interests, friendships and plans that existed independently of their careers. I've also seen people discover that retirement was much more difficult than they expected, even though financially they were perfectly comfortable. They had spent so many years looking forward to having more time that they hadn't really considered what they were going to do with all of it once it arrived.

This doesn't mean people should continue working simply because they're worried about being bored, and there are certainly occupations where people reach a point where they've genuinely had enough. What it does suggest is that there can be value in allowing yourself time to adjust, particularly when you've spent thirty or forty years operating at a very different pace.

Moving from five days to four, then perhaps three or two over several years, gives you an opportunity to discover what you actually enjoy about having more time before you have all of it. It also gives the rest of your life an opportunity to expand gradually rather than expecting everything to change overnight.

There Can Be Financial Advantages to Taking Your Time

From a financial planning perspective, a gradual transition can also change the retirement equation more than people sometimes realise.

If you're continuing to earn an income for two or three days a week, even if it's considerably less than you earned during your full-time career, you may not need to draw as heavily on your retirement savings during those early years. Depending on your circumstances, you may also be able to continue making superannuation contributions while giving your existing retirement assets more time to remain invested.

I'm deliberately speaking generally here because everyone's position is different, and the tax and superannuation rules surrounding retirement strategies need to be considered carefully. The important point is that retirement doesn't necessarily have to be an all-or-nothing financial decision.

Sometimes people assume their only choices are continuing with the full-time role they no longer enjoy or stopping work completely. Once we start looking at the middle ground, the financial picture can become much more flexible.

I've had conversations with people who initially believed they needed to continue working full-time for several more years before they could afford to retire. When we started looking at what might happen if they reduced their hours instead, the conversation changed because suddenly we weren't trying to fund every dollar of their lifestyle from accumulated savings from a particular date.

For the right person, earning something while gradually drawing less from their accumulated wealth can provide a useful bridge between full-time work and complete retirement. Just as importantly, it can allow someone to make the transition because they want to rather than waiting until exhaustion finally makes the decision for them.

Experience Can Become More Valuable When You Stop Trying to Do Everything

There's another part of this conversation that I think is particularly relevant to people in their fifties and sixties.

By this stage of a career, many professionals have accumulated an enormous amount of knowledge that isn't easily replaced. They understand their industry, know how to recognise problems before they become serious and have relationships that may have taken decades to develop. Yet many still assume the only way to remain valuable is to continue working with the same intensity they did at forty.

I'm not sure that's always true.

I've seen people move into consulting, advisory work, mentoring, board positions or project-based roles where their experience becomes more important than the number of hours they spend at a desk. Others remain with the same employer but gradually redefine their responsibilities so they're involved in the work where their experience genuinely matters while allowing younger colleagues to take on more of the day-to-day responsibility.

For business owners, this transition can be particularly important because stepping back often requires learning that the business doesn't need them involved in every decision. That can be uncomfortable after spending decades being the person everyone relies upon, but it can also be an important part of succession planning and ultimately make the business stronger.

None of this happens automatically, and not every employer or profession offers the same flexibility. Sometimes a role needs to be redesigned properly rather than simply squeezing five days of responsibility into three, which usually defeats the purpose entirely. Nevertheless, I think experienced people often have more negotiating power than they realise, particularly when the alternative for an employer is losing decades of knowledge altogether.

Perhaps the Best Retirement Plan Starts Before Retirement

The more I think about retirement, the less convinced I am that we should view it as something that begins after our final day at work. For many people, the more useful approach may be to start experimenting with the life they want several years before they intend to stop working completely.

That might mean reducing a working week when finances allow, taking longer breaks, becoming more deliberate about health and relationships or finally making time for interests that have spent years being postponed until "one day". It may also mean discovering that you actually enjoy working when work is no longer consuming most of your time.

There is an educational point here that I think is easily overlooked. Retirement planning shouldn't only answer the question of whether you have enough money to stop working. A good plan should also help you understand what choices your financial position gives you along the way, because there can be a considerable difference between being financially able to retire and deciding that complete retirement is what you actually want.

For some people, the traditional Friday farewell will still be exactly right, and if you've spent years looking forward to it, there's nothing wrong with that. For others, however, the better retirement may be one that arrives so gradually that there is never a morning when you suddenly wonder what happened to the life you had before.

You simply find that work has become a smaller part of a much bigger life, and by the time you eventually decide to leave it behind altogether, you've already built something meaningful to move towards.

Perhaps that's a more useful way to think about retirement. Rather than spending years counting down to the day you can finally stop working, you can start asking how you might gradually create more of the life you want while you're still working.

Because retirement doesn't necessarily need to begin on a Friday afternoon.

For many people, it may have already started years earlier, one day at a time.