"I'm not ready to retire"

• Are you reaching the age when your friends are retiring?
• Are they inviting you out for coffee and cake but you can’t join them because you’re still working?
• Maybe you’re not ready to retire just yet but you can see it somewhere on the horizon?

This article is for you.

Retirement is an almost inevitable life stage, but I’m not a fan of the word itself, and it strikes fear into the hearts of many people I talk to.

Part of the problem is the word ‘retirement’. There’s something so final about it. As if lacking gainful employment means you’re irrelevant. Cast out on the scrapheap.

Thesaurus.com gives these synonyms, none of which are particularly appealing:

Looking at the positive

In client conversations, I like to call this phase ‘financial independence’ because, without the hours spent in employment, you are free to make decisions about how you spend your time.

It’s a generalisation, but in my experience, men seem to suffer more in retirement than women who tend to have more hobbies and interests outside work. Men tend to need something to occupy their minds. A sense of purpose. They can’t play golf all day, everyday! Anyway, I know I couldn’t.

Many people choose to take a phased approach to retirement. Whether employed or self-employed, they wind down from working five days a week, to four, to three…

Or people change the way they work. For example, working remotely and flexibly means you might be able to enjoy that morning coffee and cake with friends, and then catch up on your workload during the evening.

How to retire

There’s a new book by Christine Benz, Morningstar’s Director of Personal Finance, called How to retire, in which she’s compiled 20 lessons for a happy, successful and wealthy retirement.

She agrees that phased retirement makes sense, as long as you maintain a good work:life balance.

You probably have a ‘to do’ list (which probably never gets any shorter!). But I like the idea posed by author Dan Sullivan, who suggests splitting that into a ‘stop-doing’ list and a ‘keep doing’ list. As the ‘Strategic Coach’, he’s been coaching entrepreneurs since 1974.

What this means to you

As this diagram shows, retirement is just one transition in the usual up-and-down phases of life.

Delaying retirement means you have more time to save money before you start withdrawing it.

On the other hand, we all know that life can be cut unexpectedly short, and you probably want to spend your time doing what you want to do rather than what you have to do.

What we do is build a client cashflow forecast, both now and once retirement kicks in, to see when you can afford to step away from working so hard, and how much you’ll have available to spend in those years. So you can start ticking things off your bucket list now, not later.

You might be surprised how soon you can start the part of your life that focuses on fishing, gardening, baking or travelling adventures.

For an update on your own financial readiness, please let us know.