What Will Get You Out of Bed on Monday

Series 3: Rethinking Retirement

Part 3: What Will Get You Out of Bed on Monday

There is something I've noticed over the years when talking to people about retirement. We spend an enormous amount of time working out whether someone can afford to stop working, yet surprisingly little time discussing what they're actually going to do once they have.

It's understandable because the financial questions feel more immediate and measurable. We can look at superannuation, investments, spending, debt and expected retirement income, then start building a picture of whether the numbers are likely to work. What is much harder to put into a spreadsheet is what Monday morning looks like when there is nowhere you need to be.

For someone who has spent thirty or forty years working, that is a bigger change than it might initially appear.

Work doesn't only provide an income. Without us necessarily noticing, it creates a framework around much of adult life. It determines when we wake up, where we go, who we see and what problems need our attention. It gives us deadlines, responsibilities and people who rely on us, and for many professionals and business owners it also becomes closely connected to how they think about themselves.

Then retirement arrives and, sometimes almost overnight, much of that structure disappears.

This is the part of retirement I think deserves a much bigger conversation.

We Don't Always Realise What Work Has Been Giving Us

I've met plenty of people over the years who were completely ready to leave their jobs. They weren't particularly sentimental about finishing and certainly didn't miss the meetings, deadlines or office politics once they were gone. What sometimes surprised them was discovering that there were other parts of working life they missed considerably more than they expected.

They missed the conversations.

They missed being asked for an opinion.

They missed solving problems and having people rely on their experience.

They missed knowing roughly what the week ahead was going to look like.

None of those things necessarily feel important while we're working because they're simply part of everyday life, yet once they're removed, the absence can become quite noticeable.

I remember saying in a conversation some time ago that going to work gives you a reason to put on a pair of shoes with laces, trousers with a belt and a shirt with buttons. It was partly said in jest, but there is something quite serious behind it. Getting ready for work represents structure. There is somewhere to go, something to do and a reason to participate in the day.

When that disappears, it's very easy to imagine that the freedom will automatically be wonderful. For many people it is, particularly at first. There are holidays to take, jobs around the house to finish and years of accumulated plans to catch up on, but eventually retirement stops feeling like a holiday because it becomes normal life.

That's often when a different question begins to emerge.

What am I actually going to do with my time?

Thirty Years Is A Lot of Mondays

People are living longer, healthier lives, which is obviously something to celebrate, but it also changes what retirement means.

Someone leaving full-time work around sixty could realistically be looking at another twenty-five or thirty years of life. That's not a short final chapter. For many people, it could represent almost a third of their adult life, which is why I think the traditional idea of retirement as simply stopping work no longer tells us very much about what those years might actually look like.

You can play more golf, travel, spend time with grandchildren, work in the garden and finally get through the list of things you've been promising yourself you'd do when you had more time. All of those things can form part of a wonderful retirement, but thirty years is a long time to fill and even the things we enjoy can begin to feel different when there is no longer anything competing with them for our attention.

I've seen people who adjusted beautifully because their lives already contained interests, relationships and responsibilities that existed independently of their careers. Retirement simply gave them more time for things that were already important.

I've also seen people struggle, and quite often they were people nobody would have expected to struggle. They had successful careers, were financially comfortable and had spent years looking forward to retirement, yet when the working life disappeared, they discovered how much of their identity had been wrapped around what they did.

For high achievers in particular, that adjustment can be difficult because for decades they've been rewarded for being useful. People called because they needed something. Decisions came across their desk because their judgement mattered. Their diary was full because their time was valuable. When all of that suddenly stops, financial independence doesn't necessarily replace the sense of relevance that disappeared with it.

That's not a financial problem, but it is very much a retirement planning problem.

Purpose Doesn't Have to Mean Finding Another Job

Whenever we start talking about purpose in retirement, I think there's a danger of making it sound far more profound than it needs to be. Not everyone needs to discover a great cause or reinvent themselves at sixty-five, and retirement certainly doesn't need to become another exercise in achievement.

Purpose can be remarkably ordinary.

It might be looking after grandchildren one day a week, helping at a sporting club, volunteering in the community, mentoring someone starting a business or simply being the person in the family who now has enough time to help when somebody needs it. For others, it might involve continuing some professional work because they genuinely enjoy it, studying something they've always been interested in or finally becoming more involved in an organisation they've supported from a distance for years.

The activity itself is less important than having things in your life that provide connection, structure and a sense that your time matters.

I think this is particularly relevant for couples because retirement doesn't happen in isolation. Two people can have completely different ideas about what the next twenty years should look like. One may have spent years imagining travelling together while the other is perfectly happy continuing to work a few days a week. One might enjoy having an empty calendar while the other becomes restless after three days without something organised.

Neither person is wrong, but those differences are worth discussing before retirement rather than discovering them afterwards.

In the same way that we talk about how much income a couple might need, I think we should also be asking how they imagine spending an ordinary Tuesday six months after retirement. Not the European holiday or the trip around Australia, but an ordinary week when they're at home and life has settled into its new rhythm.

That conversation can tell you an enormous amount.

The Best Time to Build a Retirement Life Is Before You Need One

One of the ideas running through this series is that retirement doesn't necessarily need to begin on the day you stop working, and I think the same principle applies to life outside work.

If friendships have been neglected for twenty years because there was never enough time, retirement doesn't automatically rebuild them. If you've never developed interests outside your career, they don't suddenly appear because your diary is empty. If your health has always been something you'll deal with when work becomes quieter, reaching retirement doesn't give you back the years when looking after it might have been easier.

This isn't meant to make retirement sound intimidating. If anything, I think it's quite encouraging because these are things we can start thinking about well before retirement arrives.

You can begin protecting time for relationships while you're still working. You can become involved in something outside your profession before you leave it. You can experiment with working fewer days, as we discussed in Part 2, and pay attention to what you naturally do with the extra time. You can start discovering which parts of work you genuinely enjoy and which parts you're simply tolerating because they've always been there.

From a financial planning perspective, this matters because money and lifestyle can't really be separated. When we're helping someone think about retirement, the goal shouldn't simply be to accumulate enough assets to replace a salary. The real purpose of those assets is to create choices about how someone spends what may be another twenty or thirty years of their life.

Understanding what those years are for gives the financial plan context.

Perhaps Monday Morning Is the Better Test

People often ask whether they're financially ready for retirement, and that's obviously an important question. There is another question, though, that I think deserves to sit alongside it.

Are you ready for the life that comes after work?

If you woke up next Monday with no meetings, no emails to answer and nobody expecting you to be anywhere, what would you look forward to doing? More importantly, if every Monday looked like that for the next twenty or thirty years, would the answer still feel satisfying?

You don't need to have every day planned, and I certainly wouldn't suggest replacing a working diary with a retirement diary that's equally exhausting. One of the great privileges of reaching financial independence is having the freedom to waste an afternoon occasionally without feeling guilty about it.

What matters is having enough in your life that work can disappear without taking your entire sense of purpose with it.

Perhaps that's something we should be planning for just as carefully as the money.

Because the goal of retirement was never simply to stop going to work. It was to create the freedom to spend more of your life doing the things that matter to you.

The financial plan can help create that freedom, but eventually each of us has to decide what we're going to do with it.

And when Monday morning arrives, it's useful to have an answer.