I can truthfully say that in my 10 years of early retirement that I have never regretted walking away from my career to live the early retirement lifestyle that I created. This may be a big news flash to some people, but that doesn’t just happen. I’ve seen and heard my share of retirement boredom and regret stories. Early retirement backFIRE can be a very real threat to our retirement happiness if we don’t recognize the early signs of a poorly designed, rough idling, and/or unmaintained plan. Make sure your retirement plan has the right tune up.

Image Source-Cobra USA

It’s Easy To Fall For The Mythical And Meaningless Retirement

Mentally falling for the mythical and meaningless retirement is easy to do. Even with the best of planning and understanding of what you are outside of your work. Retiring while still young and healthy will mess with your head if you haven’t yet got YOU figured out.

With my early retirement I knew to mindfully plan well beyond just finances or risk ending up feeling let down and empty because retirement expectations were way off. Believe me, the retirement transition messes with our brain in more ways than one, even with a transition plan. 

The problem is that when we’re still in the grind and thinking about what retirement means to us we do it from a place where it’s more dream than reality. It’s like researching a new and long wanted travel destination. Looking at travel sites that detail happy traveler’s stories, positive reviews, tips, and photos of a place we’ve never been before. We then mentally create our own expectations of the destination and our upcoming experience. But we all know we have to do more than just show up someplace with a pocket full of cash for that to happen. Otherwise we end up bored, spending way too much time sitting in the hotel room watching TV, or idly waiting for a magic moment to occur, regretting our being there.

The same is true for retirement. Just showing up and believing we will have a successful retirement experience can lead to finding destination disappointment. We have to be in the right mindset and actively make things happen the way we want them to.

Vital Steps For Avoiding Early Retirement BackFIRE

There are numerous early retirement success stories to be found. The only story that matters is our own. It’s a story of our own choosing where we decide what we want and expect. There are some basic things that we need to cover to help ensure we travel smoothly into this new freedom phase of life without experiencing early retirement backFIRE. 

Visualize The Retirement Life You Want

When I was still working the first thing I thought of regarding the word retirement was financial. Yes, I did want to be free from unrewarding work and purposely live a life pursuing my interests and passions. But the first issue for me was my financial plan to pull off an early retirement. The problem is a financial plan and retirement plan are two separate issues. They are often confused as being the same. Although I was fully aware that I needed to retire to something, I still didn’t give it equal energy. 

Winging it with the living part of retirement isn’t a plan. Fortunately, what I did have allowed me to be aware and adjust my efforts before any potential early retirement backFIRE set in. 

Apply a holistic approach to visualizing what you want your retirement life to be and ask yourself some essential questions: 

• What do you want your retirement life to look like? 
• How do you want to use everyday to your advantage in your newly earned life of freedom? 
• What changes can be expected to occur over your years in retirement? 
• Are there things that should be prioritized for earlier years or in later years of retirement?

Answering key questions helps create a retirement lifestyle vision with realistic expectations. 

Make Sure Your Finances Match Your Retirement Vision

I still had a feeling of financial security even though I retired early without a million dollar portfolio. That’s because the vision of my ideal retirement lifestyle matched what I could reasonably cover. My portfolio alone wasn’t a retirement plan. But my ability to fund my desired satisfying and rewarding retirement lifestyle provided a feeling of comfort and confidence. 

A common cause of early retirement backFIRE is the mismatch of finances to retirement vision. Nobody would enjoy a retirement filled with financial stress. Having a clear retirement lifestyle vision aligned with your financial resources is another key to retirement happiness. Run the numbers and if there is a mismatch then either adjust your retirement lifestyle vision or figure out a way to supplement income. 

This effort doesn’t end shortly after retirement. Making sure our finances match our retirement lifestyle is something that requires monitoring throughout our retirement. Our interest and passions will change over the years. The only thing that doesn’t change is the retirement happiness we gain by managing our finances living a retirement lifestyle aligned with the financial resources we have. 

Keep Your Head Straight With A Winning Attitude

What some see as failure I prefer to see as a positive learning experience or necessary retirement success adjustment. Our time in early retirement will come with multiple transitions and life changes. Fact is, no matter how young and healthy we are when we retire we will constantly age and change. 

It should be no surprise that aging is more physical than mental. The way I think of myself is far younger than the guy I see in the mirror. With that our retirement lifestyle vision will change, sometimes whether we want it to or not. I admit that a recent health surprise forced me to realize some of my retirement vision was going to change. It brought some short-term feelings of loss but I was then able to mentally turn it around. I was able to use it to reevaluate what was important and make the necessary adjustments. 

There are other changes during retirement that may cause opportunities to make winning retirement lifestyle adjustments. From retirement vision changes due to evolving interest and passions or physical limitations, to financial considerations due to investment performance or new wants or needs. 

Have the winning attitude that any purposely made retirement adjustments are not due to failure or backFIRE, but instead adjusted for continued retirement happiness and success. 

Forget About How Others Define Retirement When It Comes to Paid Work

I never bought into the belief that retirement meant the end of paid work. I had always planned to pursue opportunities of interest in my early retirement under this retirement definition: Retirement is the absence of needing to work, not the absence of working. Frankly, there were skills and aspects of my career that I enjoy doing. I found great rewards both mentally and financially doing some of them in new learning opportunities. Although I am happy now without a paying opportunity, I wouldn’t hesitate taking another if it checked off all of my passions and interest boxes. 

We should never consider returning to a paid opportunity as early retirement backFIRE. I read recently about the decision of a long-time FIRE advocates return to paid work. He detailed his reasons and they were valid ones. I only came upon the article because of some mocking comments on a forum I was reading. What I saw was someone who reevaluated what he wanted in his early retirement and made a success adjustment. I saw no tail between his legs retreat as others insinuated, but instead someone who understood his own head and is making tweaks to support his lifestyle vision going forward.

That’s the beauty of FIRE. Having the ability to freely decide what we want to do, when we want to do it, and with whom we will do things with. 

Happy Retirement Secret- Grow And Feed Relationships With Family and Friends

One of my biggest early retirement accomplishments is how I increased my social network. I went from only having workplace acquaintances who did not remain in my social circle after I retired to having new friendships within my community and beyond. With that comes a life of fulfilling activities and social life structure. I’ve also prioritized family. Being close to my family and friends builds connections to something more than myself. 

When I first retired I saw that I flubbed this major aspect of having a happy retirement. But once I forced myself to get out and meet new people it became easy to grow my social network. I focused on things I was interested in and then joined clubs, took classes, and did volunteer work in my community. I frequented a locally owned coffee shop that allowed me to be in my town’s loop and meet people.

Before I retired I didn’t give this element of a happy and successful retirement proper respect. But now I totally agree that our close personal relationships is what defines us, provides us with a purpose for living our life, and inspires us to create new life goals. 

Find Your Leisure Sweet Spot

We all dreamed of retirement as being a permanent vacation. The thought of lounging around and doing nothing at all is great for recharging our batteries. But doing nothing as our primary retirement focus would get old real fast and lead to early retirement backFIRE. 

We all need to have something to focus our interests on. It comes down to recognizing the difference between fulfilling activity and time-filler activity. Falling into a retirement rut is avoided by spreading our leisure time over multiple activities and continually looking for and accepting opportunities to do new things. 

 

In the end we have to write our own early retirement story. It takes more than having a fat portfolio to enjoy a happy fulfilling retired life and avoid the dreaded early retirement backFIRE. What it does take is having a retirement life plan and making sure we put effort into understanding our own head and building non work related  social connections. That and maintaining the right attitude so we can roll with the punches of life’s challenging changes, both positive and negative, and making winning adjustments along the way as wanted or as needed.