Get a Life Before Retiring Early

I feel I have some good experience with the whole early retirement thing. I also know a few folks who have also retired early. My advice to anyone getting ready to pull the plug and escape the rat race is to Get a Life Before Retiring Early.

What do I mean by that? All too often when I talk to people excited about their upcoming retirement they will say things like how they plan to garden more, climb all of Colorado’s 14ers, exercise, and have a wonderful social life. That is once they return from all of their travels. It all sounds so wonderful and we all know it’s not what we retire from that matters. What matters is what we are retiring to. They’re having a notion of what they want to retire to is a good sign but is it realistic? Their chances depend on how they answer this next set of questions.

  • Gardening sounds great, how big is your garden now?
  • Wow, hike all 14ers, how often do you go hiking?
  • Exercising is a great idea, where do you exercise today and are you changing your workout?
  • Meeting people for happy hour is a lot of fun when you retire, do you have a lot of friends?

If the answers are, “I don’t have time for that now but I want to start doing it once I retire” then chances aren’t so good that you will actually do them. There is still a chance you will. But based on myself and others who retired early we tend to mostly do the things we enjoyed doing before we retired. Not necessarily the things we did 20 years before we retired either. As we age our interests change and so do our physical capabilities. So what I mean when I say Get a Life Before Retiring Early is don’t wait until you retire to start all the things you think you want to do or think you will enjoy doing in your retirement. Make time now.

  • You may not like doing it as much as you thought you would or as much as you remembered.
  • Consider your physical situation, you may not be able to do it.
  • You may have a lot of work to do to make it happen.

I soon found out after I retired the first time that I had made a bunch of assumptions about what I would do in my early retirement leisure. So did everyone else I know that retired early. We all had made time in our lives while we were working to do what we really enjoyed doing. We also had a lot of filler-activity like watching TV, Facebook or reading magazines that was part of our lives too. The sad thing is if we don’t have real honest activities that we enjoy doing and will do in retirement, those filler-activities that we have had and obviously must enjoy will be what we do the most when we are in retirement. A filler life rut.

The Get a Life Before Retiring Early Assessment

There is a whole lot of financial assessments and planning that gets anyone to financial independence so they can retire early. However this is a non-financial activity assessment about what you enjoy to do.

First let me start with Exercise.

Exercise is the top of most folks early retirement plans. Everyone I know who retired early said it was their plan to exercise more. Yet few do because they didn’t do it before. So start by making time after work and/or weekends. Join a gym or do it at home if you can. The idea is to begin health goals and start finding out what kind of exercise you enjoy before you retire. Then you will have more time in retirement to improve upon it.

This is one retirement activity that everyone should figure out because it will pay off in more ways than one. If you absolutely hate doing it, make new plans because having more time won’t change that after you retire. Even if you do hate it and retire, it will really benefit you to make this one happen anyway. Hate the push-up, love the health benefits.

Ask Yourself – What do I like to do in my spare time?

When you have time to do anything you want (except travel) during weekends, after work, or your lunch hour, what do you enjoy doing? Hopefully you can say more than just watching TV. I do understand if you have a stressful job and any down-time for you is time to retreat to your cave and hide. But that is not what you want to retire to. Start pushing yourself.

My wife and I liked to schedule time occasionally on weekends to hike some mountain trails. It wasn’t every weekend or even every month but it was enough for us to know we enjoyed doing it. We both went to the gym after work and even though I can’t say I enjoyed all of it, I could answer this question with “exercising” because I had health goals that I was committed to. Committed to because I do like meeting my goals.

We liked to garden and every summer would have a small salsa garden. Gardens are work but it was something that made us happy and provided good healthy food. There was an excellent chance of continuing these activities in or early retirement.

Ask Yourself – Who Do I Socialize With?

Most people don’t plan on retiring early to be a recluse. I would say many want an active social life. Think back over the past year about all the events and social gatherings you attended and which friends you casually met after work and on weekends somewhere. If most of the people on the list and the events you attended were work related then you have some work to do before you retire.

This was a mistake I made. All of my friends were work related. We were bound by our common bond of corporate slavery. At first we would get together and all was fine. But as management changed and friends moved to different jobs, there was no common bond between my pre-retirement bondage and their new obligated servitude anymore. We drifted apart. I had to make a huge effort to meet people in my town.

If you have the same situation then start meeting people in your community before you retire. Make the effort now while you are still working and begin your social life.

Get a Life Before Retiring EarlyAfter I retired I hung out at a local independent coffee shop that I really I liked. I went there every day 3PM to 4PM and after a while made friends with a lot of people who stopped in during the same time. Find a place you enjoy and make yourself available to people. I know a lot of people in my town now and it is nice being invited to local events and social gatherings.

Ask Yourself – What Do I Want to do in Early Retirement?

Go ahead and list it all. Travel is cool as long as you keep it within your budget. But this is a non-financial post so that is all I will say about that. Other than travel, list how you THINK you want to spend your time in retirement.

Now Compare Lists – What you enjoy doing now vs what you think you want to do in retirement.

Hopefully many of the things beyond watching TV and Facebook will show up on both lists. If there are things on the “Want to do in retirement list” that aren’t already part of your current lifestyle then look at ways to add it to your life before you retire and at least test it out. You don’t have to have everything match up now. It won’t mean an early retirement of boredom and TV. However, the more you try to do and make part of your life before you retire early the better the indication that you will be one happy and fulfilled early retiree.

In Closing

I didn’t fully realize how much of my life revolved around my job and the people there until I retired. I had a lot of work to do to build new friendships and be comfortable with my new retiree identity including how I spent my time.

Retiring early isn’t going to bring you a full life on its own. You need to already have that life and the drive to add to it. Retirement will then give you more time to play in it.

You should also have a bucket-list of things you want to do in retirement. Things that you can’t make time for before you retire. Plan to keep adding to that bucket-list even after retirement. Go into your early retirement seeing it as an adventure. Stay open to new things, ideas or activities that you may not even know about or consider today.

That said, it isn’t gloom and doom if you don’t Get a Life Before Retiring Early. But by doing it you really up your chances of avoiding falling into a TV, Facebook, YouTube rut and instead having a full and active retirement lifestyle.

Finally, the two most important early retirement plans that everyone should have on their lists are: Keep Learning and Stay Curious.

How about you, do you believe we should Get a Life Before Retiring Early?

4 thoughts on “Get a Life Before Retiring Early

  1. Good Post. Never too early to start having a life outside of the job. I think of myself as a fair photographer. It is my free time passion and when I retire in a couple of years I plan to take it to the next level. I put off getting serious about it earlier than I did because of my work. I am glad I decided to start enjoying it now before I retire.

    1. Thanks for the comment Franklin. It is good to have some hobbies or in your case a talent to retire to. I wrote this post becasue of a discussion I had with someone I use to work with who retired early and lamented about all the things they thought they would do and never do it. They weren’t bored but felt like they just spin their wheels. I am sure when you pull the plug you will run with your photography and have a fulfilling early retirement experience.
      Tommy

  2. Great post. You are right, there is no reason to put things off until the future, you can do lots of fun things you strive to do post-retirement when you are on your journey to retirement.

    I’ve been retired 3 years now and I have certainly more time for things I did in pre-retirement (golf, fishing, exercise) but I did all of those things before I reached FI, just not as much as I do today.

    1. Thanks for the comment Steve. I think a lot of people are putting their life on hold waiting for more time. That’s all right for some things but for the majority of things we will be doing with all of our retirement time the best time to start is before getting there. It’s kind of like enjoying the ride means a better chance of enjoying the destination. Like you said, you just have more time now to enjoy doing what you enjoy doing.
      Tommy

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