By Jack Calhoun
“I just want enough money to go sit on my porch, watch the clouds drift by and not have to worry about anything.”
When I was in my wealth management days, one of my clients – I’ll call him Tim – said this to me when I asked him what his wealth accumulation goal was. He said it half-jokingly, but there was a hint of truth to it as well.
At the time, Tim was the CFO of a thriving, regional manufacturing company. He worked long hours and was deeply devoted to his career. But, now in his mid 50s, Tim was burned out and longing for the day he could retire.
Within a few years, he got his wish. Tim’s company was acquired by a large national conglomerate and, thanks to his equity interest in his company, he received a hefty payday from the sale. Suddenly, Tim had all the money he needed for the rest of his life.
In the year or two that followed, Tim seemed to be living the retirement dream. He was still young enough to enjoy his money and his hard-earned freedom. He and his wife Shannon bought their dream house, and they traveled a lot. Tim played golf a few times a week and kept busy doing projects around the house.
"He just mopes around all day"
After a couple of years, though, Tim’s demeanor seemed to change. He got crankier and less engaging. It became harder for me to convince him to meet for lunch - he preferred to just talk on the phone.
Then Shannon called me one day and asked me to meet with her one-on-one in our office. This was unusual, because she had always come in with Tim in the past.
When we met, Shannon asked me to go over their financial situation (which was still in great shape). But then she asked if we could talk about Tim.
“I don’t know what to do about him,” she confided to me. “I can’t get him out of the house. He hardly ever plays golf anymore. He just mopes around all day. He doesn’t have anything to do, and he doesn’t have many friends. I think he’s depressed, but I can’t get him to talk to anyone.”
Shannon seemed to want guidance from me about how to get Tim out of his funk. But I was in my late 30s at the time, and I had no guidance to offer.
As Tim’s financial advisor, I had checked all the boxes I was responsible for when we did his retirement planning. We did the income calculations, estate planning and Monte Carlo simulations to be sure his portfolio could withstand thousands of different stock market scenarios.
To me, Tim seemed to have done everything the right way. He worked his tail off for 30 years, made a bunch of money and rode off into the sunset to go do whatever he wanted to do, and not have to do anything he didn’t want to do. How could he not be happy? Wasn’t that the whole point?
I couldn’t understand it then, but now - 20 years later - I understand it completely. Because I went through it myself when I sold my company and left my own career behind.
It turns out that the financial planning is only one part of the puzzle, and it’s the part that’s a lot easier to solve than the other, intangible part:
How are you going to stay engaged and purposeful when your first career is over? What’s your new mission going to be?
At this point, you may be thinking, “Yeah, right. Give me a big payout and I’ll find something to do!”
But figuring out what that “something” is doesn’t just fall in your lap. Like Tim, many people – especially those who are high achievers – find going from a 90-mph career to full-stop retirement to be jarring and disorienting.
Here’s a post I saw recently in a Facebook retirement group discussion:
“Retired three years ago as an international airline pilot. Haven’t adapted well. Suppose it’s a Tuesday morning, temp outside is 42 degrees, it’s 10 a.m. You’ve had a bite, listened to the news, worked out for an hour. Now what? What do you do the rest of the day and tomorrow and the next?”
Freedom to do anything vs. freedom to do nothing
This is what I call the “wondering and wandering” phase of retirement. It comes right after the “endless vacation” phase, after your travel bucket list is checked off and you’ve played all the golf and planted all the tomatoes you can stand.
That’s when most people realize they need that next new thing in their life, the thing that’s going to keep getting them out of bed in the morning. Because it turns out that being free to do anything is great, but being free to do nothing gets old really fast.
As author David Brooks said in his viral Ted Talk, “Freedom isn’t an ocean you want to spend your life in. Freedom is a river you want to get across so you can plant yourself on the other side – and fully commit to something.”
You need a plan and a process to help you find your next thing to commit to; one that helps you navigate what is likely going to be a period of time nearly as long as you spent in your first career. Maybe even longer.
Because if you don’t have a plan and a vision for your next thing, “nothing” becomes your default. And before you realize it, nothing becomes all you know.
