How to Plan Life After Retirement

Our Secret to a Happy Retirement

When you’ve been working so hard towards the goal of financial independence it can be easy to lose sight of what happens afterwards. You’ve put in your last day of work; you’ve got your finances all lined up; what happens next? 

So often, we haven’t really thought through what will make up the day-to-day experience of our new lives. Instead we’re too busy holding down jobs and managing busy schedules and tracking spending. We just don’t give ourselves enough time and space to think about what we’ll do once we reach financial independence and no longer need to spend our days at work.

But it’s important to remember why you’re on this journey to financial independence and to have a vision for what happens next in your life. For that reason, we’re sharing our experience of deciding on the focus of our post-work life, along with a few tips for how you can come up with your own vision for the future.

Why have a plan?

So why is having a plan for after you retire so important? Why not just figure it out after you’ve retired? 

From our perspective, if you don’t have a plan for your future, you might find yourself facing some of the potential downsides of retiring. These can include a loss of identity after stepping away from your job….feeling isolated when you no longer have colleagues to interact with on a regular basis. Finally, there’s the issue of becoming bored when you no longer have a daily work routine to provide some structure to you life.

And if you think that you’ll never feel this way, you just need to check out some of the online forums to see just how many people feel a loss of purpose and direction once they’re a few months into retirement and the initial excitement has worn off. 

We talked about the emotional side of retiring in a recent video and blog where we assessed our own early retirement six months after stepping away from work. 

Our personal challenge

For our part, it took a lot of work to come up with a future that we both wanted to retire to. In the years before we retired, we were both plugging away at high-pressure jobs as expats in Singapore. One of us had a tunnel vision focus on her career and one of us was dreaming of something different but really struggled to articulate what that might be. 

Gillian knew that she didn’t want to spend the rest of her life stuck in an office but wasn’t sure what she wanted to do. She knew she was happiest when she was outside and being active but that wasn’t a clear enough life plan for the two of us.

Gillian kept trying to engage me in a discussion about this crazy thing called financial independence and retiring early. But because she didn’t have a clear idea of what she wanted for herself or us, it was really hard to get on board, especially because I got a lot of fulfilment from my career. It was only when I was feeling really burnt out from work that I was ready to roll sleeves and start planning a new future.

If you are in a relationship, coming up with a plan for the two of you together is a key part of getting your partner on board. 

What can retirement look like?

When you’re thinking of what your life could look like in retirement, remember that there are a range of ways people can experience retirement. You’re now free to pursue any interests and endeavours that you’d like. New areas of focus could be relationships with family and friends, volunteering for causes that you’re passionate about, maybe it’s developing new skills. You could start new passion projects, some of which may even end up generating income.

Some people may argue that some of these activities are no longer retirement — especially if they are generating some small income — but let’s not get so hung up on terminology. We’re talking about a stage in life where you aren’t dependent on working for a living so you’re free to pursue whatever you wish.

How will you spend your time?

So what does your ideal future look like? How will you spend your time? Is there a larger purpose, mission or goal that you would like to focus on? Are there any changes you would like to make in your life pertaining to relationships with family and friends, new skills, new projects, or even your surroundings?

There are a lot of hours in the day to fill. So the danger is that if you don’t have a plan or goals, you might just end up whiling away your time on the couch watching Netflix. You could even miss some aspects of having a job, like having colleagues and a feeling of accomplishment when you get through a big project.

As we mentioned, when we were first planning our retirement, we really didn’t know how we would spend each day. But after putting in the work of planning, we now have lives filled with the feeling of purpose and direction. So with that, we have a few tips to help you plan your life once you’ve finished with work. 

What do you love about your life today?

Let’s start by talking about what you love about your life today. We suggest listing out at least five things that you really enjoy doing today. These are the things that make you happy. Of course, don’t stop at just five…list as many as you can but at least five.  

Consider all areas of your life…family, friends, hobbies, experiences, even things about your job that you enjoy right now and you would like to continue enjoying. Maybe it’s having challenging projects or lots of casual interactions with colleagues.

When we did this exercise, we came up with a very long list but we’ll share our top five here:

1. Travel
2. Trying new cuisines 
3. Enjoying the outdoors with our dogs
4. Spending time with family
5. Fitness

So those were things that we really enjoyed doing while we were still working for a living. 

What you’ve always wanted to do 

Next, think about all those things that you always wished you could do but never had enough time. Put together a list of at least five but even more is better — as many as you can think of. 

For this one, think big. Don’t be constrained by what you feel is possible or realistic; this is the time to dream and imagine doing what you always wanted to do. Whether it’s finally running a marathon or going to grad school or sitting on the board of a local non profit or learning how to cook French cuisine or hiking the Himalayas. Of course, these are random examples. Spend some time thinking about your own dreams…maybe it’s something you thought about when you were a kid.

When we did this exercise, we each had some very different big ideas from each other but we also had some in common. Here were our top five: 

1. Live as a local in different countries 
2. Design and build a tiny home
3. Grow our own produce 
4. Take our dogs on multi-day treks 
5. Share our early retirement experiences through a creative project 

Choosing where to start

If you put these two lists together – the things that you already love doing plus the things you always wanted to try – you’ll have at least 10 ideas to get you started.

From your list of 10 or more, choose the top three activities, pursuits or projects that you really want to make part of your life in your first few years of retirement. These aren’t the only things you’ll be doing, of course. But they should be the things that you definitely want to include and create time for on a daily or weekly basis.

Our top three retirement activities

After we created our list, we had a series of conversations and eventually decided on the three main activities that would be our focus in the first couple years of our retirement. 

Live as a local in different countries. Since we retired we’ve been living in countries for a month or two at a time. So far we’ve covered five countries, including our home country where we’ve been stuck for a few months due to the pandemic.  

Enjoy the outdoors with our dogs, including multi-day treks. We’ve been able to do many full day hikes with our little guys and we hope to take them on some multi-day treks this year

Share our experiences through our YouTube channel. For us, this is a creative project that is helping us develop new skills and is also giving us an opportunity to connect with other like-minded people interested in financial independence and travel

Of course, our days are filled with other activities as well, but these three are really driving the agenda in our first year of retirement and give a sense of direction and purpose to our days. 

For you, deciding on those top three activities or projects will go a long way in helping you feel you’re living a life worth retiring for. At a minimum, it will keep you off the couch.

Most surprising about retirement 

Now we’ll share what we found most surprising about life in retirement. Far from being bored, we actually didn’t have enough time to do everything we wanted to do. 

We started our retirement thinking that we would have all the time in the world to do everything we always wanted to do. Instead we found that there are still only 24 hours in a day and seven days in a week. So we found that we needed to bring more structure and routine and goal setting to our days. This helped us become more focused and productive in our daily activities, and therefore more satisfied and fulfilled with our new lives.  

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