The Three Things Money Can't Fix in Retirement (E143)

You've spent decades working toward retirement. You know your asset allocation. Maybe you've even run Monte Carlo simulations, and you could probably explain your safe withdrawal rate at a dinner party without any notes. You're ready, but let me ask you something you might not have the answer to. What are you actually going to do on a random Tuesday in year four of retirement? Now if that question gives you pause, this episode is for you. Welcome to Personal Finance for Long-Term Investors, where we believe Benjamin Franklin's advice that an investment in knowledge pays the best interest of old and finances and in your life. Every episode teaches you personal finance and long-term investing in simple terms. Now here's your host, Jesse Kramer. Welcome to Personal Finance for Long-Term Investors, episode 144. I'm Jesse Kramer, a financial planner working with retirees and busy professionals getting ready for retirement. All across the USA, you can learn more at planwithjesse.com. This week's review of the week is from Time Freedom First, who left kind words and a five-star rating on Apple podcasts. So Time Freedom First, you can drop an email to [email protected] and I'll get a super soft podcast t-shirt mailed out to you. All right, on with the show. There's a version of retirement that looks great on paper. You know, you've probably hit your numbers. You're leaving work on your own terms. You've got some time, you've got plenty of resources, and you've got freedom. And this is what we spend most of our time talking about here on this podcast and thinking about the resources that is right and the optimization. And it's certainly something that I spend most of my time thinking about working on at work. But then there's the version of what actually happens to a lot of retirees where the freedom itself maybe feels unmoored, untethered, uncertain, maybe even a little disorienting. The days start to blur together in retirement. And something, maybe even something that can't quite name, feels off. And the gap between the idealized version of retirement and sometimes the actual version of retirement, right? It's not a financial gap. The money part, the resources are just fine. The gap is in everything that the financial plan probably doesn't account for-- identity, connection, and structure. This invisible architecture of a working life that we don't actually notice until that working life is gone. So today I want to make that architecture visible for all of you. And more importantly, I want to give you ways to start building that architecture for yourself, that retirement version of that architecture. Ideally, you can start building it before you actually need it. But perhaps right now is the best time imaginable for you to consider it. So we're going to walk through three areas in detail. First, identity. Who you are when your job title no longer describes you. Second, relationships. What happens to your social world when you're built in social structure of work disappears overnight. And then third, routine. How you build a life with some shape and some purpose to it when your schedule is wide open. And then at the end, I'll work through a list of some common blind spots and some pitfalls that might not quite make sense at ages 40 or 50 or 60, but do become important realities in retirement at age 60, 70, 80, and beyond. So let's start with the first of the three big segments today, identity. So here's a sobering statistic. 2018 study from the Institute of Economic Affairs found that retirement increases the probability of clinical depression by roughly 40%. And researchers consistently point to the same underlying cause, the loss of professional identity as a primary source of meaning, structure, and social belonging. And then a 2020 study in the Journal of Organizational Behavior found that people whose identities were heavily anchored in their careers often experienced some form of identity crisis before they could move forward really into retirement. And here's what makes it tricky for high achieving long-term planners specifically. The more competent and committed you were at work, the more your identity was probably built around or interwoven with work. I would argue that many of you listening right now might fit into that bucket. High achieving long-term planning, competent and committed individuals. Sounded a lot like this audience. And yet it's those very skills or talents or character traits that make the transition into retirement sometimes a challenge. So let's think about the last gathering you want to, social gathering. Someone walks up to the extend their hand and they ask you one of the most common questions in the English language. So what do you do? And you probably answered without thinking a few sentences maybe with your title and your company and your industry and your done. But now if you imagine your couple years into retirement, the same party, the same question, the same outstretched hand, for a lot of retirees, that is the kind of moment when they realize how much weight their career was actually carrying. It helped define your place in the world and your value in the world and your story in the world. And for decades, your career answered those questions for you somewhat automatically, right, without any extra effort on your part. And a lot of retirees feel strange when the answer used to be, "I am a, right, I am a pilot, I am a engineer, I'm a teacher." And it turns into, "I used to be, I used to be a pilot, I used to be an engineer, I used to be a teacher." So here's something I'd encourage you to do. And I mean, actually do. We've got a few different exercises that I kind of wrote into today's episode. So obviously if you're listening right now on a walk or as you drive, you don't have to do this exercise, but try to remember this exercise the next time you're at your desk. Or by all means, listen to this complete episode and then maybe come back through it and do these exercises. The next time you've got a pen and paper in hand. Or, I suppose you could always pause the podcast and do it out loud. So what's the exercise? The exercise is to write your retirement bio. A genuine answer to the question, "Who are you right now without your job title?" It's actually a little harder than it sounds. And most people start writing and they might realize that the first couple sentences are still about their former career. Well, I've 40 years I was an engineer at General Electric. And that's fine because it tells you exactly how much identity work might still be ahead of you. A good retirement bio, or at least one version of a good retirement bio, probably answers these three big things. What you care about, how you spend your time, and what you are building or contributing to. Again, this doesn't have to be a polished or permanent document, but it should be able to probably stand on its own without referencing what you used to do for a living. So here's a very simple example for a, again, this is a retirement bio. I spend most of my mornings outdoors hiking or working in the garden, depending on the season. Three days a week, I mentor some early career professionals through this local business program in my area to helping them think through decisions they might not have experience yet to navigate on their own. My wife and I are learning Italian kind of somewhat because we're actually going to spend two months in Sicily next fall. We're both of Sicilian heritage. And I'm about 40 pages into writing something that might become a book. It might just become a really long document that nobody ever reads. But either way, I'm writing it. I'm really enjoying writing it. We love to cook a lot. We love hosting other couples over at our house. And in our downtime, my wife and I are working our way through this top 100 TV shows of all time list, catching up on some excellent shows that we missed during our busy working years. And in summary, that pretty much fills up our days. So now, that was one example of a retirement bio. And dare I say, it sounds fairly fulfilling to me. And there was zero mention there of what this hypothetical guy and his hypothetical wife, what their actual careers were. And that brings me to an action step for this segment, the identity segment of today's show. So ideally, a year or two before you retire. But it's okay to do this if you're already retired. Identify two or three roles. That's not a ROLL, like a dinner role. It's ROLE, like a role in a play. Identify two or three roles that will define you in your first years of retirement. Not hobbies, per se, but roles. And the distinction there, at least to me, a hobby is something you do. A role is something or someone you are. So, you know, golfer is probably a hobby. But volunteer golf coach at the local course. Now, that's a role. Board member at the animal shelter. That's probably a role. Part-time babysitter for my grandkids. That's a role. Yes, of course you want hobbies too. But the difference is that a role requires some accountability. The sense that someone out there is counting on you to show up. And that's not incidental. You know, one of the things that work provides that we don't really talk about that much is the feeling of being needed. That other people are counting on you in big ways or small ways to show up every day and do a job. And when you remove that feeling, that responsibility overnight, it can leave a hole that, you know, daily golf won't fill. But being the volunteer golf coach will fill. So think in terms of some roles. Two or three roles is probably more than enough. Write them down. And if you can't name them yet, no problem. But that's your homework because a financial plan without an answer to that question does have a gap in it. Whether the spreadsheet shows it or not. Here's a quick ad. And then we'll get back to the show. Did you know my written blog, The Best Interest, was nominated for 2022 Personal Finance Blog of the Year. And it's been highlighted in the Wall Street Journal, Yahoo Finance, and on CNBC. I love writing, especially when that writing is to share financial education. And I usually write one or two articles per week. You can read them all at bestinterest.blog. Again, the web address is bestinterest.blog. Check it out. With that, let's put a pin in identity. And now let's move forward onto our second pillar of the day, relationships. And we're going to start by talking about another thing that nobody puts into their retirement plan. One in three adults between ages 50 and 80 reported feeling socially isolated in 2024. And researchers have found that loneliness raises the risk of mortality by about 25%. Placing it alongside smoking and obesity as a major public health threat. Now, I'm not necessarily saying that retirement causes loneliness. The relationship there is probably more complicated than that. Clearly not. So causal is that. But what the work does consistently show is that work, you know, being employed is a social infrastructure, a social architecture. And most of us don't realize how much we're relying on that social infrastructure until it's gone. But when it comes to relationships, it's more about friendships and colleagues and people to chat with over coffee. It's also about spouses and other partners. And that's a big part of retirement too. Another research study shows that 62% of couples retire at different times. And even when they retire together, the shift to suddenly being home together full time catches a lot of couples' complications. a completely off-guard. For 40 years, they were working their full days totally separately, and now they're spending all their time at home together. Marney Fuerman, who's a couple's therapist, she put it plainly about retirement when she says, quote, "There will be an adjustment period and couples need to cut each other some slack. It takes time to adjust to each other's new boundaries and new limits." Retirement really is a stress test for relationships like that, and plenty of couples discover that they've been relying on their separate work lives to maintain some harmony at home. And now when the work lives end, the harmony at home might disappear at least temporarily too. So think about for a second what work actually provides socially speaking. So for many of us, it's a built-in community of people we see every day. It's a shared mission that gives us something to talk about. It's lots and lots of nice casual interactions at the coffee machine passing by in the hallways. Lots of colleagues become friends or at least friendly, and maybe you have clients, clients can be become friends or friendly. Talk by default because you're seeing the same people time after time in close proximity for years. And something I've realized over time is that a lot of these interactions and relationships are ambient. They're happening around you while you're focused on something else, right? You're kind of focused on doing your job, and yet the relationships and interactions are happening there in the background too. And I think a big reason why it's so easy to underestimate what happens when you retire is because of that reason. It's that you might not have actually been paying attention to the relationship side of it that much anyway. To you, it was just work. And there in the background, the relationships were certainly building along the way. Then retirement comes and it all stops. All at once, you know, the calendar clears up in your inbox or teams or Slack or whatever it is these days goes quiet. And maybe in the first few weeks of retirement that feels like freedom, but fast forward a few months or a year or two, and a lot of retirees notice that the silence is too quiet. And the days have a lot more open space that isn't being filled. And what they're feeling isn't laziness or boredom, at least not usually. At least one of the things they're feeling is the absence of social infrastructure and infrastructure again that was ambient. They never really had to build it because work was automatically building it for them without them really trying. So here's the exercise for this segment of the show. And again, I'd encourage you to actually do this when you have time, not just not along. And this one is targeted again, especially towards people who are still working. If you're retired, great. You should still do it anyway. But if you're still working, this is an important one. The exercise is to audit your work social life. Sit down and list the people that you'd call genuine friends. People you'd reach out to independent of work. People you'd stay in touch with if you both of you changed jobs tomorrow. But then separately list the colleagues. Yeah, you're friendly with, but you're friendly with them primarily because of work. For most people, the second list of kind of incidental friends because of work that second list is way longer than they expected to be. It's not really a flaw. It's just the way that social life works when you're at work, when you're busy. And employment, work puts you in proximity with many different people repeatedly over time. And that's a pretty good basic formula for friendship. But those proximity-based relationships don't usually survive the removal of that proximity. I mean, I can raise my hand and it makes me feel guilty sometimes, right? I spent seven years working as an engineer. And there are very, very few of my former engineering colleagues who I'd say I keep in close contact with. And I think some who at the time I saw every day and considered myself really good buddies with them. My cube was really close to them. We literally would see each other five days a week for many years. And yet even now I don't see them every day and I candidly don't keep in as good a touch with them as I should. And maybe some of that is because life just gets busy and everybody understands. But that's the way it works for me here at 36. And of course, I could understand that that's the way it probably works in retirement too. It's that removal of proximity. And it's a big reason why many work relationships just fall to the wayside in retirement. And even if you do intentionally grab lunch with your former colleagues a few times a year, it's hard to maintain the same level of relationship if it's only a few times a year. You know, you used to see these people every single day. So the action step here is simple to describe but probably a little harder to execute. It's that before you retire, start deliberately investing in friendships and communities that exist completely outside of work. And this has to be probably the biggest but certainly one of the primary strategies for your relationships in retirement. So okay, what are some ideas? It might mean getting serious about a recurring activity, a weekly tennis game, a book club, a volunteer commitment, something like that that puts you in repeated contact with the same people over time. Remember, proximity and repetition is a great formula for building friendships. You're just recreating it intentionally via your chosen activities instead of accidentally through work. It might also mean having an honest conversation with your partner about what your social life as a retired couple actually looks like. Do you have shared friends? Do you have parallel friends? A mix of both maybe involving some couples that you both get along with? Do you have things you do together outside the house, whether as a hobby or as a role? And the goal here isn't to jam-pack your social calendar necessarily. But instead, the goal is to achieve some sort of social life that doesn't depend on your employer to exist. And building that type of social life is probably one of the most underrated things you can do to prepare for the softer side of retirement. So now we've talked about who you are without your work, and we've talked about who you're connected to without your workplace. And now we're going to pivot to the third thing that work has been doing for you all these years. Work has been giving your days a shape and a structure and a skeleton and a schedule. And that's what we're going to talk about next. You know, there's a funny challenge that comes with unlimited free time. It's harder to manage than it sounds. Which consistently shows that the shift from full-time work to having no specific obligations can certainly feel exciting initially, but then quickly starts to feel emptier than retirees would expect. The structured nature of a working life, it gives way to these long unstructured days that many retirees find genuinely difficult to navigate. You know, feelings of boredom and that feeling of a lack of productivity are among the most commonly reported surprises of retirement, especially actually early retirement. It turns out. Since people achieve maybe age 60, 62, 65, something in their mind says like, "Yeah, I've done my 40 years. I don't quite feel the need to be uber productive anymore." But something about early retirees, people retiring in their 40s and 50s, they do report that lack of productivity at a higher rate. And I wonder maybe if it's because, hey, if you were productive enough to retire at 45, it probably means you were very, very productive during your career, maybe even a little bit over the top in how productive you could have been, and just, you know, you worked long hours for a hard driving company. And maybe you are the kind of person who all of a sudden when you try to turn it off says, "I don't feel productive anymore and I don't like it." Anyway, that's just my very amateur observation. And I want to pivot to a recent Wall Street Journal article by Stephen Criter Yoder and his spouse, Karen Criter Yoder. And they're both in their late 60s. Stephen was an editor for the Wall Street Journal and I don't think Karen worked for the journal, but she's a good writer anyway and they're married. And the headline of the article that they co-wrote, they kind of took turns writing this article, and I'll link the article in the show notes. The headline is, "Where does our free time go in retirement? Too often it's social media." And then the subtitle of the article is, "We're trying to fight our smartphone addiction, but with so much time on our hands and no job calling us, it isn't easy." I found it to be an eye-opening article. I'm really glad they wrote it. So Stephen writes, "I'm part of an epidemic among retirees I'm convinced. Studies warn us that social media may harm children and such scrutiny is critical. Addictive sites clearly can plague working adults too. But we retirees have a particular vulnerability. We have time on our hands and no external authority telling us to snap out of it." Let's have a show of hands. How many retirees have ended a day looking up from the phone, wondering where the time went and feeling the mental equivalent of having finished off a family-sized bag of potato chips? Yeah, that's what I thought. On the job, I did my share of syriptitious video watching and Twitter scrolling and e-commerceing, deadlines and bosses drew me back into the real world much as the school day and homework and parents broke my TV trans as a kid. As a retiree, I have little to rely on but self-control of which I have little when my phone is in my hand. From my point of view, it's not necessarily a moral argument against social media, though I do think there's probably a good one to make there. It's more of a design argument about your day-to-day. We want to try to build a retirement structure that gives your time somewhere better to go than in Mr. Yoder's case into his smartphone. Of course, this can be challenging. The structure has to come entirely from you. That's something that Stephen was writing about right there. There aren't deadlines or meetings or deliverables or customers or performance reviews to think about anymore. It's just you alone your days and your time. I'm going to pause here really quick for a quick distinction that might be worth holding on to. I do think there's a difference between a schedule and some sort of weekly rhythm. I don't think I'm not advocating for an hour-by-hour retirement schedule. Some of us, that's how our work calendars look. We have every hour scheduled out during the work week. But this word that I'm going to use, which I couldn't quite find a better word for it, so I called it a retirement rhythm. A rhythm is more of a set of these recurring anchors that give your weeks some recognizable shape, or maybe they give you months a recognizable shape. That's up for you. But I chose week. It gives your week a recognizable shape, but doesn't go so far as to dictate kind of minute by minute or hour-by-hour. A lot of retirement advice jumps straight to the scheduling itself. They say, "Keep it calendar," and they say, "Treat your retirement like a job." Block your time out like you would at a job. I understand the impulse, but I do think it's worth pushing back on slightly, because I think trying to replicate the density of a working schedule in retirement is hard to do. It tends not to stick. I just say that because in some ways, I've always thought about weekends and vacations as almost these many testing grounds for retirement. When I think about my Saturday and Sunday, I know these broad strokes of things that I want to get done on a Saturday and Sunday, but I do not. have a schedule for my Saturday and Sunday, the same way I do at work. The same thing goes on for vacation. When we go on vacation, we do some research beforehand and we think about the places we want to go and the things we want to do in each city, but we don't have a 30-minute blocked out schedule for a vacation. And I think it's probably most helpful to think of retirement the same way. Something that works well, both what the research say and what some anecdotal evidence point to, is having that "rhythm." I'll use that word again, the rhythm. So a consistent morning routine, a few days each week anchored by some sort of commitment that someone else is counting on you to show up for. Some big project that pulls you forward into the future, physical movement built into your week, not necessarily just as exercise for its own sake, but as a part of a structure to build around. You can also include right social touch points that recur without requiring some sort of constant planning. So again, there's an overlap here, as you can see, between identity relationships and scheduling structure. But yeah, that's not a true work schedule, but it's also not completely formless, right? There's some sort of skeleton, some sort of rhythm in there, that the rest of your days, the rest of your weeks can be built from. So the action step for this segment is to draft what I would call a retirement week rhythm or retirement weekly template, not minute by minute, but a loose map of the week that identifies your big anchors. Again, the recurring commitments, the routines, the activities that give each day some shape and some structures. I suppose there's maybe infinite categories that you can think of, but at least for me, the way I would approach it, I think of my days in kind of four categories, or at least I try to, especially if I had all the free time in the world. Work days definitely are a little different. Having my days currently with two small children feels a little different, but if I had a free day, if I had a day, if it was a weekend day, and maybe my family was out of town and it was just me, there are four categories that I would think of. A morning routine, so something consistent that starts your day with some intention. Second would be some physical activity. Again, not necessarily a gym schedule, but just some physical movement that's built into the week in a predictable way. Third would be social commitments, some sort of recurring touchpoint with other people each week, and ideally something that someone expects you to show up to, not something that you can easily blow off. Then the fourth one would be some sort of big project or contribution, something I'm building or something I'm learning or something I'm giving away that has forward momentum to it. Then of course, the rest of the day, the rest of the week can fill in around those things, because something you'll notice in there is one of the pillars isn't time to wind down and watch some TV. Of course, I could do that if I want to, but the whole point is that these are some kind of important things, at least for me, and I think important things for a lot of different people, that once you have these anchors in place, the rest of the day will fill in. Just a fun example here. We've got our retiree, Bob the builder, Bob was a former engineer. He's in his late 60s. He was always a project-oriented guy, not naturally social, per se. His morning routine is just coffee, black coffee, and 30 minutes of reading, anything that's non-fiction. His physical activity, he takes a 45-minute walk every morning, the same route, the same time with the same dog. It's usually the same dog. His social commitments, he's got a Tuesday lunch with a small group of retired colleagues, and Saturday mornings, he's always at this week's habitat for humanity build site, giving him some social interaction. Then for his big project, that recurring thing that pulls him into the future, he's restoring a 1967 Mustang in his garage, and he's got a spreadsheet where he's tracking that project. So you can see, you know, he's got morning routine, physical activity, social commitments, and a project. It's not a complete schedule. There's nothing very specific about this schedule in terms of actual times, but it's the idea of having some rhythm and having some anchors in your life. You need enough anchors that the week has a skeleton to it, and the rest can be genuinely unstructured, and that unstructured time is going to feel like freedom rather than emptiness, because it exists inside a framework. I think this is a really fun exercise, and I went through it myself, and I thought about, you know, what would my retirement template look like if I had to do it? And I'm not planning on retiring anytime soon, but if I had to do it, I would think about I'm an early riser, and I love starting my day with coffee, and I don't usually eat breakfast. But I'd love to take the dog for a walk every day, so that sounds like a great way to start the day, a great morning routine to kind of anchor my days. It also checks off a little physical activity, but on the actual topic of physical activity, big fan of racket sports, so I could do that two or three times a week. It's also a good social anchor, because usually when you're playing a racket sport, you have to have someone to play against. Social commitments, I do some volunteering around Rochester, I'm a member of the Rochester Rotary. It's just, you know, great ways to interact with people and do some good in the world, and my wife and I are both pretty social too, and I could see us building some recurring social outings into our weeks. And then the project is a really exciting one to think about. I mean, as of today, the blog and this podcast are huge projects of mine, but do I want them to continue forever into retirement? I genuinely don't know, but I feel like the world is this amazing oyster when it comes to long-term committed projects, and I'd be excited to brainstorm here and just think of all the cool things I could do. So if you can't tell, I think this activity's pretty fun, exciting and interesting and invigorating to think about what you would do with all that time. And of course, important to ensure it's an important exercise to do, to ensure that you have a successful retirement. So what does your retirement template, your retirement rhythm, those anchors every week? What does that look like? How are you structuring your average week? I would think about that if I were you. Here's a quick ad, and then we'll get back to the show. I send a free weekly email to thousands of readers that shares two simple things, just two. The first are my new articles and podcasts, so you'll never miss when I publish new content. And the second is my favorite financial content from other corners of the internet, so you can see what's been helping me the most. But Jesse, I don't want another email. I hear you. I make this newsletter short, sweet, and full of essential information, and readers enjoy that. About 85% of newsletter subscribers are engaging with newsletter more than once a month. They're enjoying it, and you will too. You can subscribe for free on the homepage at bestinterest.blog, and you'll get a free PDF of my white paper, titled The Step-by-Step Guide to Building Your Retirement Paycheck. That's right, a free weekly email that thousands of people like you are already reading, a free white paper to help you plan for retirement, and you can sign up for free at bestinterest.blog. So that's some thought for you all on routine and structure, our third major pillar. So now let's pivot to some pitfalls and some blind spots that when people plan for this softer side of retirement, they're not quite aware of. A few of these, I think, are really interesting, really cool to think about. So I'm going to start with my favorite one, rather than bury it to the end. My favorite one is called The End of History Illusion. Left to their own devices, almost every person falls for this in some way. It's very, very common. In short, it occurs when someone fully recognizes how much they've changed in the past, yet simultaneously believes that their current self will remain unchanged compared to their future self. It's as if you could say history simply ends today for them. We all recognize that we've changed over our past, but few of us account for how much we're going to change in the future. So you could say that the weekly template that I just designed a couple minutes ago with racket sports and dog walks, while fun for me today, it's likely maybe not that effective or realistic because by the time I retire, who knows what I'm going to be interested in. I'm interested in those things today, but I probably won't be interested in the future. I didn't even know. I didn't even play tennis and squash 20 years ago. And now it's two of my favorite pastimes. So who knows what my favorite pastimes are going to be 20 years from now. So that's the end of history illusion. And it's just a thing a good reminder here is that your retirement bio and the role-finding exercise and the weekly template exercise, you can treat them as living documents meant to be edited. They're not necessarily solved problems. That brings us to the second fallacy or the second bias of the second pitfall. It's the arrival fallacy. A false belief that reaching a major goal retirement in this case will produce lasting happiness. As in, I finally arrived. I've made it. Many retirees are shocked to find that making it doesn't feel the way that they had imagined it would. The anticipation often exceeds the reality not because retirement is bad, but because the brain quickly adapts to the new baselines. Adaptation is a big theme in the world of happiness and finances. We quickly adjust, we quickly adapt to changes in our life, both good and bad. And retirement isn't an arrival, or at least that's the important thing to try to remind ourselves of right now. Retirement is not an arrival. It is a very nice mile marker on what's probably a never-ending journey. It's not the finish line. And that brings us to the third one on this list, a very famous one if you've listened to enough or just read enough kind of psychology and finance books. It's the hedonic treadmill. The fact is that the novelty of retirement activities, traveling, golfing every day, sleeping in, that fades faster than expected. And what felt like a reward becomes the new normal within months. And what felt like something special just becomes kind of plain and normal within a few months. So without deeper sources of meaning, such as the roles that we discussed earlier, retirees can find themselves chasing novelty just to feel engaged. The next pitfall is the productivity trap. Many high-achieving retirees can't tolerate unproductive time. We already talked about this one earlier. They have this need, this desire to fill every hour, to over-schedule themselves, to mistake the act of being busy with meaning. And the trap is that they end up recreating the stress of their working lives in their retirement, but without the financial ward or without the social structure, and they end up kind of burning out on retirement itself. So that's the productivity trap. And then the last one on this list, which is probably my second favorite one on this list, is called competence withdrawal. And I feel like this one is kind of relatively sneaky in that it ends up being a lot more negative than people might otherwise assume. The competence withdrawal. So for many of us, work provided this daily experience and this reinforcing reminder of being good at something. It makes us feel good at something, the feeling of competence. And that feeling of competence can be deeply motivating. So when we retire and when that feeling disappears overnight, retirees often feel deflated. That lack of daily feeling, that lack of reinforcement, it leaves a hole. And now that antidote to it is finding some new domain inside your retirement where mastery is again possible and that can connect us back at least for today's conversation. It connects me back to that whole project or contribution category, right? Bob the builder was restoring that 1967 Mustang. And for him, I hope the the act of doing that is this nice reinforcing reminder that he's good at it. You know, he's a good mechanic. He's good with his hands. He thinks like an engineer. I think it's important that we try to find something like that in retirement. Again, it's likely going to be a long-term project or some sort of long-term committed contribution that makes you feel competent. So with that, let's zoom out for a second. We covered a lot of ground today, mainly identity, relationships, and routine. And I want to name something more explicitly before we close because I think it's easy to walk away from a conversation like this and file it under some sort of category that's like soft, soft to think about later. Because candidly, that's probably what I would do. At least as I sit here at, again, age 36, I'd probably say my retirement identity and my retirement relationships and my retirement routine are all problems for another day. Those are all problems for future Jesse to figure out. So my challenge to you, especially if you think to yourself that you're within, I don't know, 10 years of retirement or if you're retired, you're actually retired. My challenge to you is don't do that. Don't do what Jesse would do and put it off for the future. So while these might be soft topics, their legitimate retirement risks, just like sequence of returns risk and healthcare risk and inflation risk, the difference is that they don't show up in a spreadsheet and you can't really measure them in numbers and they certainly don't get the same kind of planning attention that we're used to thinking about from a financial planning point of view. And yeah, that's a mistake. I mean, first off, it's easy because whenever we can't quantify something, it's easy to say, "How can I put it in a spreadsheet? I can't quantify it." But still, it's a mistake to ignore these things because the research is unambiguous. Their retirees who struggle aren't usually the ones who ran out of money. They're the ones who ran out of purpose or connection or structure. So let me quickly review those three exercises today in 60 seconds to leave you off with those kind of top of mind, especially if you kind of put them off earlier in the episode. Here they are for you again. The first exercise was to write your retirement bio, a genuine answer to the question, "Who are you right now without your job title?" A good retirement bio answers three big things, what you care about, how you spend your time, and what you're building or contributing to. The second exercise is to start deliberately investing in friendships and communities that exist completely outside of work. It might mean getting serious about a recurring activity, like a weekly tennis game or a book club or a volunteer commitment. Something that puts you in repeated contact with the same people over time. So remember, proximity and repetition, it's a great formula for building friendships. You're just creating it or recreating it intentionally via your chosen activities instead of incidentally or accidentally through work. And the third exercise is to draft that weekly retirement rhythm template for what your week looks like. And again, I just thought of four different categories that I think are helpful, and they were a morning routine, a physical activity or multiple physical activities, social commitments, and then the fourth one was that long-term project or contribution. Again, the retirement bio for identity, the friendships and community for relationships, and the template, the weekly template for routine and structure. It's okay to make these documents living, documents again, living drafts because again, we know a lot can change between now and your retirement, but you want to start thinking about it today. So, think about what we covered today as three legs of a stool, right? Identity gives you a sense of who you are in the next chapter and your retirement. Relationships give you the people to share it with, and routine gives you some container that holds it all together. But if you pull out any one of those legs of the stool, the whole thing maybe starts to topple over, lose some stability. And that's again, regardless of how your portfolio is performing or how tax-efficient your withdrawals have been, none of these things today identity relationships and structure, weekly structure. I mean, none of them happen automatically. It requires you to build it. They require you to build them yourself. Intentionally, ideally in a dance before you need them, but hey, worst cases you build them once you're already retired and you realize there's a hole there. So that is some real retirement planning for you right there. The numbers alone maybe get you to the starting line of retirement. But today's episode, I hope, will help you actually run the race. So if this episode resonated with you, I'd love to hear, from you. I'd love to hear that feedback. Please send me an email to [email protected] or leave a review on Apple Podcast or share this episode with someone who maybe is two or five or 10 years out from retirement themselves, but hasn't started thinking about these topics yet. Because that person probably needs to hear it from you more than they know. And thank you as always for listening to personal finance for long term investors. Thanks for tuning into this episode of personal finance for long term investors. If you have a question for Jesse to answer on a future episode, send him an email over at its blog, the best interest. His email address is [email protected]. Again, that's [email protected]. Did you enjoy the show? Subscribe, rate, and review the podcast wherever you listen. This helps others find the show and invest in knowledge themselves. And we really appreciate it. We'll catch you on the next episode of personal finance for long term investors. Personal finance for long term investors is a personal podcast meant for education and entertainment. It should not be taken as financial advice and it's not prescriptive of your financial situation.