I recently finished reading Retirement Starts Today by Benjamin Brandt.
Overall I think it’s a solid read.
I wouldn’t put it among the best retirement books I’ve ever read, but it does make one GREAT point: you need to actively plan for and practice your retirement life before you retire.
There are plenty of retirement books that focus almost entirely on the financial side of retirement. They cover withdrawal rates, tax strategies, Social Security timing, Roth conversions, sequence of returns risk, Medicare decisions, and investment allocation. Those topics are all important, of course, and many of them can have a significant impact on retirement success.
But what I appreciated about this book is that it spends most of the time discussing the actual experience of retirement. In other words, what happens after you finally get enough money to stop working? Or, really the point of this book, even before you get enough to stop working?
Unfortunately, those are questions many people don’t spend enough time thinking about.
Most people are laser focused on getting to retirement. They want to hit “the number,” walk away from work, and finally feel free. But relatively few people stop to think through what they are actually going to do with the next 25-35 years of their lives once they get there.
That’s where this book shines. It certainly gets that point across.
IMO it didn’t really need to be a book…maybe just a four-part article series or so…which is why it’s not among my best retirement books list. It’s main point is valid and worth taking action on, but there’s also a lot of ancillary content that’s covered better in other books. It’s also not written that well and is a bit redundant at times (I wanted to scream, “I get the point! Let’s move on!” a few times.) So get this book at the library, read the first few chapters, and you’ll have the best parts of it. Or just read my posts and you’ll have the highlights of the best parts of it. Hahaha.
I’m going to cover this book in three parts.
Today I’ll share the major point of the book in its own words and my take on those ideas.
In the second post, I’ll give 10 key retirement concepts the book made me think of.
Then in the third post I’ll list 10 ways people can practice retirement while they are still working!
Let’s get started…
Why You Need to Plan for Retirement
We begin with the book building its case for rehearsing retirement. Here’s the first comment:
I’ve heard it so many times before, usually from other clients who are either in the final stretch of their careers or already retired. Either they’ve been so laser-focused on the financial transition that they now feel a bit lost, or they’ve romanticized retirement without test-driving how they would actually spend their time.
Now, as a retiree, they find themselves lost.
This is the main warning in the book: if you don’t plan for your retirement life, you’ll get…who knows what? And that that result is more than likely a bad one.
I have said many times that if you go-with-the-flow you will get go-with-the-flow results. Yes, you could hit the jackpot doing this. But the odds are so low of that and so high that you crash and burn, why would you want to risk 30-40 years of your life on rolling the dice?
No, it’s MUCH better to have a plan. It’s even better to have a plan that’s been tested in advance.
The book goes on…
You need to think about what you are going to do with forty hours a week, fifty or so weeks a year, with the time formerly occupied by — well, your occupation.
Can you really fill all that time with pickleball and The Price Is Right? Better yet: do you want to?
Hahaha.
You can’t fill all your retirement time with any one thing, so you’re going to need a few to several activities if you want to have a great retirement.
If you need help on what these could be for you, see my list of the top seven retirement activities as well as my huge list of retirement activities.
That said, pickleball can certainly be part of a great retirement — I’ve proven that.
I’m not sure The Price is Right is that valuable, but it might be an enjoyable experience. But you will want to avoid making eight hours of TV a day your retirement plan because that is certainly a recipe for disaster.
The main question here is what are you going to do with your time? Forty hours is a looooooong time every week — and that just covers your work hours — you still have more “free time” to make up for. If you’re up at 6 am and to bed at 10 pm, you have 112 hours to fill every week. That’s a lot…
The book goes on:
Consider retirement the beginning, not the end—an opportunity to be the person you always dreamed of becoming. We all need to give some more thought to this, and there is no time like the present. In other words, retirement starts today.
The key takeaways here:
- You can create the retirement you want (and become the person you want to be). This is completely up to you.
- To do this, you need to plan and take action NOW.
- This is why “retirement starts today.” (which is why the book is named accordingly)
And it continues:
Too many of us think, “When I retire, I’m going to be able to do what I really want.” But how do you know what that is unless you’ve spent significant time actually doing it? And how do you know whether you’ve prepared financially to do it? We don’t really know what we will love without the experience of doing it. And most people, I’ve observed, dream up a whole life they’ll live someday—after they retire—instead of intentionally planning for that reality now.
As a financial planner, I have no shortage of clients who tell me they thought their entire retirement would be dedicated to golf. Eighteen months later, they’ll tell me, “I’m sick of golf. When I was sitting in a cubicle, that was all I could think about. But it’s not as fulfilling as I thought it would be. What do I do now?”
If you’re not imagining today what retirement will look like, then you are setting yourself up for disappointment.
And on:
Why? First of all, if you’re like most people, you don’t know what you want to do. If you’ve never experimented with who you will be when you retire, how on earth could you know how that person will want to spend their time? And if you have an idea of what that might be, you probably haven’t practiced it yet.
Most people enter retirement without a clear vision and without any real experience with the thing they think they’ll be doing most of the time.
This is like waiting for opening night of a play you’re performing in to learn your lines. It won’t work. It’s like waiting until the big “game day” before you take a look at the playbook. You are not setting yourself up for success by doing this.
Waiting for an “improv” sort of retirement can have financial ramifications, too. Many people retire and think they have to spend their way into a hobby to get out of a personal rut. So they buy the fishing boat before they know whether they! actually enjoy fishing, or purchase a second home at the beach without spending much time on the coast. When we are reactively trying to create something, there is no guarantee that we’ll end up in a situation we’ll love.
Whenever I hear a person say, “I’m going to wait until retirement to do what I love,” I hear someone who probably doesn’t know what they love.
How can you love something you’ve never tried? Approximately $52.4 billion in unused vacation pay and personal time off (PTO) gets squandered every year.’ Most people aren’t experimenting enough with the free time they have now to know how they’ll enjoy their freedom later.
What if we didn’t wait, though? What if we started practicing the kind of people we want to be at retirement? What if we began bringing our future into the present? That’s what this book is about.
I’m going to end there, but the book does go on and on for awhile repeating the same issues (as I noted above):
- You can become who you want to be in retirement.
- But you can’t do it unless you practice retirement (and various activities) while you are still working.
- If you don’t do this, you are risking a retirement disaster.
We’re going to move on for now as I think you all get the point.
Retire as Soon as You Can
Before we proceed to the topic of practicing retirement, the book covers this story I thought was worth sharing:
The Friday before we were going to meet, he called again. This time, he was pensive and reserved.
“I still want to have my meeting on Monday,” he confirmed. “But we are not going to talk about any of the money stuff.”
When he arrived, he told us that he had received a diagnosis from his doctor that was not only fatal, it also drastically reduced his life span. His whole life had changed in a single moment. Instead of having decades ahead, his life expectancy had been reduced to just a few years.
“I still want to do all those things we discussed,” he said quietly. “But I know I don’t have thirty years to think about it anymore. We need to reconfigure. I still want to do all the fun things we discussed for my retirement, but I want to do them in the next three years. I want to travel abroad, take my grandkids while I can…because I don’t know how long I have?” It was a sad way to learn that the sooner we start walking towards the goal of how we truly want to live, the sooner we are going to get there. Don’t delay living the life you could live some day. Start now. It’s all you have.
I wrote Life is Short. Retire Early. over six years ago. It’s a story of a couple who waited to retire only to find out soon afterwards that one of them was fatally ill.
In addition, we have an often-contributed-to thread in the MMM forms titled “Retire as Soon as You Can” with story after story that mirrors the one in my post. Here’s how our forums AI summarized that thread:
The discussion “Retire As Soon As You Can” in the FIRE category emphasizes that life is fragile and unpredictable, urging members to prioritize time over accumulating wealth. ESI Money initiates the thread by sharing stories of early death and the regret of those who delayed retirement, noting that health crises can strike at any age. This sentiment is reinforced by personal tragedies shared by users like [mentor], who survived cancer and retired to enjoy life, and [member], whose husband died at 46 before enjoying their savings. [Mentor] shares a courageous diagnosis of pulmonary fibrosis, serving as a stark reminder that health can deteriorate rapidly, making immediate retirement crucial for those financially ready. [Mentor] argues that time is the most precious commodity and that retirement should be a goal to “run to” rather than a distant finish line.
In short, no one knows what tomorrow brings. Why risk it and put off retirement when you have the ability to be free now? You don’t know if you’ll have the time to be free in the future.
As many of you know, I had some back issues that plagued me for the greater part of two years. I am much better now, back to maybe 90% of my old self thankfully, but during those dark times I wondered if I would ever get better. One thing that brought me comfort was knowing that I had (at that point) eight GREAT years of retirement in the bank — many more than most people ever get.
Anyway, this was worth sharing…let’s get back to the main message…
Rehearsing Retirement
The book then starts to dig into its main line of thinking. It addresses what people should do about the issues above (how to create your own great retirement) with the suggestion that we all should “rehearse” retirement.
This reasoning begins with this:
A “retirement rehearsal,” then, is an attractive choice for a lot of people, because they still have money coming in. If your employer is willing to cover all or part of your health insurance during this period, that’s a huge bonus, particularly if you are under the age of sixty-five and not eligible yet for Medicare. With health insurance covered, you would probably feel like you have more abundance, and pursue the things you hope to spend more time doing in retirement.
And what do you do while rehearsing retirement? Some suggestions:
You can explore hobbies, travel, and do some of the things that you think are going to occupy your time in retirement. By exploring those now instead of later, you have invested very little financial or emotional risk; if you find out that you don’t love a particular activity, you can explore something else and breathe a sigh of relief that you didn’t wait until you were fully retired to learn that lesson, along with a built-in sunk-cost fallacy.
It may take four, five, or even a dozen different attempts until you find the thing you love—and don’t be surprised if you hear yourself saying, “I never pictured myself doing – but I love it!”
Better to find that out now, when you can devote more years to doing it, than to discover it too late in life to do anything about it.
So true!
Why wouldn’t you do this?
Why not try out several things (intentionally) to see what you like doing and what you don’t like?
My guess is that there are some things you think you’ll like but won’t and vice versa. I sure have had that experience.
I thought I’d like to explore a few hobbies that had always interested me: coin collecting, bonsai tree growing, tai chi, etc.
So far, I still find them “interesting” and may do one or some of them one day…but I have yet to do any of these yet in a decade of retirement. So was I really that interested?
On the other hand, I didn’t even know what pickleball was when I retired! I never thought of buying one business and starting another. And who knew we’d end up moving…TWICE? But all of those have been major parts of my retirement (and mostly good.)
So, how do you rehearse retirement? The book offers two solid suggestions (and I’ll cover more in part three). Here’s the first one:
If you can switch to a phased retirement—maybe you go from forty hours to thirty, and eventually, twenty—then you also have to acknowledge that once you reach the end of your career, your value isn’t stuck. Your value consists of many things, including your decades of experience, which is no longer tied to a nine-to-five schedule; you can channel that experience into an entirely new direction, on your terms. Give yourself permission to graduate from learning how to work to being a seasoned, experienced professional who blazes their own trail.
A phased retirement gives you roughly three to five years to start experimenting with how you’ll spend your time during retirement while financially planning for fewer years spent in retirement, and hopefully, reduces the number of years you would have to pay or supplement your health insurance until you qualify for Medicare. While Medicare isn’t free, most people see a significant savings by moving from their current health insurance into Medicare. Now you have thousands of extra dollars to spend each year, because you are no longer funding your retirement-you and your advisor have worked out a plan, and you have saved enough.
This also gives you real data regarding what retirement will cost. If you could live as a retiree for two weeks to a month (optimal), remembering that you are already starting to spend some of the money saved, you can rest the waters with minimal risk.
I personally love this idea. I’ve mentioned it before on this site, but having another person say it again makes me smile. lol.
Here’s how I imagine it could work…
In year 1 you move from 40 hours a week to 30 (or maybe 32 if that keeps your full benefits). This gives you one day a week to play at/rehearse/practice retirement — whatever you want to call it. On that day you start to create what an average retirement day would look like for you. You start with nothing, add some things, take some of the losers out and add new ones in, and keep adjusting until you get a solid retirement day you love. This is then the foundation you can build on.
In year 2 you move to 20 (or 24) hours a week. Now you have two days a week of freedom to expand your retirement life/plans. It would be best if these two days were next to each other (so you could practice an “extended” retirement day) and even better if those days were Monday/Tuesday or Thursday/Friday (so every week you’d have four consecutive days off). This is where we could really get some good practice at retirement.
Then in year 3, you could do one of several things:
- Keep your current hourly commitment but get some of it as a work from home arrangement.
- Go to an even lower schedule — like 16 hours (two days) a week.
- Leave the company altogether with a pre-negotiated consulting contract.
- Quit work entirely and never go back.
I would have LOVED to have done something like this but things were different in the olden days. If you proposed lowering your hours you were looked upon as not being committed to the company and you risked being let go completely — something I didn’t want to risk as the sole earner in the family.
But Covid changed all that. Now it is much more accepted to work from home, have reduced hours, make work sacrifices for family matters, etc. — so it’s a real possibility for many.
Next the book offers another idea for how to practice retirement:
I encourage everyone to use at least a week’s vacation ahead of time to do a “practice retirement.” This isn’t the big moment, just a rehearsal. But like any performance, if you want to do it well, you have to practice it more than once. I recommend doing practice retirements for years, if you have the time, experimenting with who you want to be in this next season of life.
If you get two weeks’ vacation time every year, take that time and pretend you’re retired. Don’t work or travel, just live as a retiree for that time. Look for what bores you, what excites you, and what you can learn from the experience. Quickly, you will see how much time you have and where you might want to spend it.
The goal isn’t to get this absolutely right the first time. Do it enough, though, and you’ll get better each time you do it. Your vision for the future will become clearer as will your idea of the person you are becoming. And you will be on your way to a retirement you will love.
I love this idea as well…though it may be difficult to implement.
We used almost all of my vacation visiting our families (mine and my wife’s) so there wasn’t a lot of extra vacation left laying around.
But later in your career you may have more vacation and can use a week or so to try out the retired life.
Two Final Tips
The book shares a couple more tips on finding your best retirement, starting with another concept I have talked about previously on this site:
We don’t have to completely reinvent ourselves on day one of retirement.
In fact, it’s better to do a lot of small things in the years leading up to the big day.
No one suddenly wakes up one day as their future self. That comes with practice, from building small habits over time. And little habits can create big change.
I love, love, love the concept of doing small things over time and having them add up to something big.
I wrote about this over nine years ago in Make Small Progress Every Day I still use this process for many goals.
And finally, the book gives some suggestions on how to test a true retirement lifestyle:
Consider building an average retired day (wake up at this time, do this physical activity, take spouse to lunch, do this activity throughout the day, then wind down reading your favorite book, and go to bed). This — far more than buying a boat or booking a bunch of vacations — is going to lead to your biggest breakthroughs in retirement. It’s the kind of thing that allows you to have your cake and eat it, too, the best of both worlds: you can have fun experimenting with different things you might enjoy while crafting a solid vision for the future.
In other words, make your retirement tests “normal life.”
Don’t book a cruise to “test out retirement” because all that’s testing is one event that might be 1/100th of your retirement. You want to test a day that’s going to look like your average retirement day.
If you can do the reduced hours idea above, you can build this day brick by brick (using small steps) over time. Even within the first year you should have a pretty good sense of what retirement will look like and you most certainly should after two years.
Then you are set to pull the ripcord whenever the finances are available.
This is the heart of the book. It tackles an important subject that I think all future retirees should consider.
Stay tuned as I’ll post part two of this series soon.
