Personal Prosperity in Retirement
Finding Your New Path to Personal Prosperity in Retirement
No one could watch network television for very long without seeing multiple advertisements selling financial planning and investment strategies for retirement. Dennis Hopper leans into your screen and enthusiastically cajoles, “You can’t start this journey without knowin’ where you’re goin’. My friend, ya need a plan.” The ads are aimed, of course, at persuading us to buy stocks or equity funds or life insurance. This is all well and good. Indeed, we do need a financial plan that will assure that we have enough income to continue to live the good life in retirement. But after we’ve come home from our fabulous cruise in the Mediterranean, we’ve paid all the bills, and we’ve had a good day on the Dow Jones, will it be enough to sit around and count our money? We need more than financial prosperity. What is our path to our personal prosperity?
For those of us who have tended well to our financial prosperity, retirement must surely seem the ultimate lifestyle: a steady, guaranteed income with plenty of reserves, and plenty of time to relax with no obligations to anyone but our weekly bridge partners and our grandchildren. But this vision can conceal a trap – the trap of overwhelming uselessness.
Many years ago, I knew a successful building contractor. He built my first and second homes. Vern had a hectic lifestyle, but financially, he had put together a “bundle” that allowed him to retire “early” and to pursue his dream. He had family connections that allowed him to own property in Mexico. His dream was to retire there and go fishing. He bought a beautiful view lot near a little town on the coast of the Baja Peninsula, built a spacious and comfortable home, and retired there with his wife. Three years later, I was shocked to see him at our local County Fair. Vern had moved back to California and resurrected his construction company. I asked him what had happened. I’ll never forget his answer.
“You can go fishing and to the post office only so many times before you start to feel pretty useless. I felt so useless, I started to go crazy.”
This is not an uncommon story. Vern came out of his “dream retirement” to restore his sense of self-worth and usefulness. Anyone looking forward to immanent retirement is well advised to consider a plan to revise his or her model of self-worth. Some take on a new career. Some get involved in community service and volunteer work. Some commit more time to family. And some devote their life to nurturing their spiritual growth. One’s self-worth is a personal matter, unique to each individual. When a major part of that source of self-worth shifts away from your career, be careful to have a plan to reconstitute the “New and Improved You.”
In 2000, when I first considered taking an early retirement from my professorship at the university, my life-long friend urged me not to retire from but to retire to. As a practicing clinical psychologist, he noted that over the years he had counseled (and consoled) retired successful CEOs who had found themselves in post-retirement depression. These retirees were financially elite. They had abundant financial security. They surely needed no advice from Dennis Hopper. But they had failed to put together a plan that replaced the challenges associated with the fulfilling leadership responsibilities of their careers. After long successful careers that profited them with financial prosperity, golf and polishing the Mercedes fell far short of their expectations for those wonderful retirement years. The sudden transition from a “Somebody” to a “nobody” was traumatic to their sense of self-worth and their morale.
Heeding my friend’s advice, I thought long and hard about my own transition. Certainly, I was not in the same income league with a large corporate CEO, but for many years I had been in a position of leadership over the operations of an academic department. I had felt a great sense of fulfillment both as a professor in the classroom and as the Chair of a nationally recognized academic program. I realized that as I transitioned into retirement from a long career, I needed to be mindful to guard against the potential for my own post-retirement depression. I would need to re-constitute my “Somebody”.
I considered several options. In the end, I decided to take advantage of California’s Faculty Early Retirement Program. This gave me the opportunity to transition gradually while teaching part time for five years before I finally emptied my office and turned in my keys. During this five-year period as a part time faculty, I not only adjusted to my reduced leadership responsibilities, I took advantage of my reduced time commitment to transition into my new career as a full-time life coach. It was the right decision for several reasons, but most relevant in this context, it gave me something fulfilling and productive to look forward to in “retirement”. Expectantly, I transitioned from college-level teaching to my second career. I love my new “responsibilities” as a life coach, and I have yet to feel any loss or depression from my transition from the classroom and the rigors of academia.
As a life coach, one of my areas of emphasis is helping others transition into retirement. Although I encourage clients to maximize their financial options, I am not a financial advisor. I have no stock options to sell, no bonds to peddle, no investments to add to anyone’s portfolio. My approach is more holistic. I consider my retiree-client as a whole person, and together we focus on how to rediscover fulfillment and self-worth in the transition from a job or career. Together we rewire the “Somebody” into the “New and Improved You”.
We begin by re-assessing personal passions and priorities. We look closely at what really matters - what’s most important. What gives the client the greatest sense of fulfillment? We then look at options to focus on those priorities. Let’s say our priority is to generate a feeling of fulfillment through service to others. What are some of the ways we could be of service to other people? Options might include consulting, volunteer work, or mentoring. In what context might my client feel most fulfilled? Perhaps we determine that the client would enjoy assisting others in a learning environment. Maybe he or she has always had a passion for working with kids. What options might be considered in that context?
Next, we determine a realistic goal. Sometimes, there may be more than one realistic goal. Let’s say that the goal is to volunteer as a teacher’s aide in an eighth grade science class. Now we need to know just what that means. What are the requirements? What would be the workload? How does the school district regulate teacher’s aides? Would there be any physical demands beyond the client’s capacity? Knowing the specifics related to becoming a teacher’s aide, we need to determine a set of objectives, the specific steps needed to achieve our goal. And then we need to put those objectives into an action plan with a timetable. Finally, the client needs to follow-through with the plan.
Yes, Dennis, to find our path to prosperity in retirement, we need a plan. We need a financial plan, AND we need a “fulfillment plan”. And we need to be as deliberate and as determined with our “fulfillment plan” as we are with our financial plan.
It is said that in Nature the key to survival is adaptability to changes. The changes that come with retirement may seem benign, but all too often require more adaptation than we think. The key to finding our personal prosperity in retirement is to optimistically and positively anticipate and plan for the inevitable changes. With some careful and thoughtful planning, retirement really can be the best years of our lives.