Retirement starts 2 years before you stop working
A successful retirement starts two years before you plan to move into retirement. Here are ten focus areas for a transition into retirement.
As of the publication of this post, I am about five months from transitioning into retirement.
Only one area focuses on finances. Yes, you need to get your finances in order, and I recommend an advisor to help you with that portion of retirement.
These ten reasons revolve around what I call the retirement triangle: mind, Body, and Purpose. For me, a successful retirement revolves around three areas: purpose, Mind, and Body—my Retirement Triangle.
1. Get your finances tuned up - Let's get it out of the way first. Hopefully, you have been working with a Fiduciary, fee-based financial advisor. And you have been updating your lifestyle goals and the finances needed to support your ideal lifestyle. Ensure you fine-tune your plans and communicate openly with your advisor on timelines, available work benefits, and spending assumptions. Get your finances lined up. Two years out is the time to refine and firm up your plans.
For me, this included how much cash I wanted on hand (I wanted to be insulated from any risk of a sequence of returns).
Related to finance, I found Bill Perkins's book Die with Zero a great resource for challenging the societal assumptions around retirement savings and spending. Die with Zero provides a counterintuitive approach to retirement finances. It is worth a read.
2. Need to start transitioning away from the structure of work. Work provides us with a daily structure. Regardless of shift, we typically spend most of our day working. When you retire, you will not have work to structure your day. This unstructured time may be a challenge for you.
The mistake when you retire is thinking, "I have all the time in the world now." For me, that will not work. I need structure. Even on the weekends, the days get away from me, and I don't accomplish everything I need or want. If you are honest with yourself, you'll agree that you need to accomplish more than watching TV, endless scrolling, or napping. You may say you want that and are looking forward to it, but after a month or two, that will not work.
Now is the time to start transitioning to structuring your day when work is unavailable. How do you plan on spending your day? How will you block out time to workout, socialize, spend time on your hobbies? Start planning that now. Will you have a morning routine?
With the current work shortage, depending on your current job, you may be able to leverage your career capital to start transitioning. Maybe you can work part-time or reduce your workload. This can give you a chance to work on structuring this additional free time. Start figuring out how much structure you need and how you will achieve this structure.
3. Focus on solidifying your social network. You need friends and social interaction outside of your work friends and that environment. When you leave your job/career, you will lose touch with most of your work friends. It happens. How much have you kept in touch with work friends who have already retired or left for other jobs? Exactly, not as much as you thought.
Work friends and the times you would catch up at work will be gone. Start focusing on developing and nurturing your social friends. Some of your friends may already be retired, or you already spend time with them outside of work hours.
4. Communicate, Communicate, Communicate. Retirement is not solely a personal decision if you have a partner, spouse, or significant other. Make sure everyone understands what your retirement means. Do you still work part-time? Is the expectation that they also retire? Do they need to keep working? Can they retire? If you plan on traveling, how will that work if your partner still works? See point 2. If you are both going to stop working, then there will be two people who had work schedules now home, potentially together, all the time! Man, you must be ready to handle that, both of you.
5. Refine or redefine your purpose. Why are you here? How do you contribute to the greater community and world? The purpose is a key leg of my retirement triangle. Your life's purpose doesn't end when your career/job ends. Your purpose is more significant than any job. Now, you will have more time to deliver on your purpose. Purpose gives you a reason to get up in the morning and gives you structure, challenges, and a life's reason.
6. Define what you want retirement to look like and then work back from that vision. Cal Newport calls it Life style Centric Planning. Start with the end in mind: where you want to live, what you want to do with your time, and what you want to contribute. Synthesize all this into a defined lifestyle. Now, you can measure your finances, purpose, and current lifestyle against this ideal. You have something concrete to work towards. You work towards not a singular goal but a series of milestones and actions.
Remember, just because it is a great vacation spot may not be an excellent residence location.
7. What hobbies are you going to continue or start? Now is the time to think about it. You have so many options. Some are active for your body, and some challenge your mind.
Start a YouTube
Start a Blog
Art
Musical Instrument
Photography
Golf
Hiking
Camping
Climbing
Cycling
Triathlon
Swimming
Running
skiing
Consider combining a love and desire to travel with your hobbies.
It's a great time to see if you have the gear, training, and access to these hobbies. Can you afford the hobby with your current financial position, or are there changes and prioritizations you can make to ensure you can afford these hobbies?
8. If you have kids or relatives. You need to start thinking about the impact of having kids, grandkids, or even parents on the lifestyle you want.
The decisions you make around this key attribute will impact where you live and how you spend your time. Do you want to be able to see all your grandkids events? Do you have elderly parents for whom you are the caregiver? All things to consider.
Do you want to have access to close, quality health care? That will have a significant bearing on where you decide to live. Does your financial plan incorporate these desires and plans?
9. Think about what you want your exercise activities to be. You have heard it before, but your health is your most important retirement asset. Give some thought to what you want to do in retirement. Do you have current physical activities that you can continue and expand, or are there other activities you want to take up with all your additional time and flexibility? Consider the necessary equipment, supplies, time, and locations for these activities.
10. Be intentional. What are you going to do? Don't let retirement happen; you do retirement. If you are reading this, then I suspect you want to be intentional about your retirement.
What type of retiree are you going to be? It is similar to the person you are now. Do you need clarity about what you will do and how you will do things? Can you enjoy more flexibility in your life? Can you enjoy that much flexibility? Can you do things solo, or do you need someone to do everything with? You will be around your significant other almost all the time; keep that in mind.
Bonus Tip - If you have a home, get a professional home inspection. A professional home inspection is a great way to identify repairs needed to your home. Any significant hidden expenses that you are not aware of. Also, please don't wait until you are going to sell your home to get it in great shape. Spend the money now to enjoy your home to its fullest while preserving its value.
Summary
Around two years out is a great time to consider these facets of the Retirement Triangle—things to consider as you make the next big life transition.
Practice Needs a Purpose
Practicing drawing needs a purpose. Likewise, practicing football, baseball, and the violin requires a purpose. So before you start any practice, you need to be clear on your purpose.
Purpose lets you experience total satisfaction. When you know what you are practicing for, you have clarity when you are done that you either achieved the objective or understand what you need to do next time to complete your purpose. Either way, you get feedback.
Today's drawing focused on using colors on the same side of the color wheel to create a sketch.
Not using the "actual" colors of the object but just picking two colors to draw. I achieved that objective. This drill will allow me to think beyond the object's color and more toward a fun, exciting color pallet.
What is your purpose for doing something today?
Lemon
Colored pencils again today.
I used yellow and the complementary color purple to give the lemon structure and highlights. With the light coming from above, the highlights are strong on the top and cast a strong shadow.
Progressing
I was hesitant to draw today. I had the pressure and negative energy of failure. I was procrastinating because my drawing wouldn’t be good and would frustrate me. The opposite happened; I am one drawing closer to improving my skills. 1% improvement daily. I will improve my drawing by drawing.
What do you want to improve, but you are generating friction and procrastination?
Donald Duck
Today I drew Donald Duck.
If you follow my Instagram feed JDHayes50, you know I’ve been on a Disney Character kick. It started when we were done at Disney’s Food and Wine Festival, and the Tropical Storm came through. My wife and I were at Disney Springs and came across Learn to Draw Disney Celebrated Characters Collection book. I picked it up, thinking we would be quarantined in our room for a while.
I am enjoying the step-by-step tutorials.
A rookie question, but the step-by-step tutorial has overall shapes you draw and then refine down to the detail. So how do you remove the general shape lines to get to the final drawing? I’ve tried erasing it, but the overall shape gets out of whack.
I hope you enjoy this.
Water Kettle with Proportions
There are techniques to help with drawing subjects in proportion. Using your pen/pencil at eye level is a method to help determine ratios. For example, I used my pen to line up the kettle's total height, the spout's height, and how far the handle extends from the body.
This drawing seems to be in proportion and resembles the real thing.
Manager Vinylmation
Today’s drawing was fun. Using two pen sizes, I created my interpretation of the Manager Vinylmation. It was fantastic to free-hand the Vinylmation’s contours and then use the fountain pen to add the details.
Mix it up as you work on your drawing and art skills.
Challenge yourself and take advantage of all the tools you have
Chair – Negative Space
When you have a complicated subject to sketch, an effective technique is to draw the negative space. You focus on the open spaces and draw those rather than the intricate details of the subject—an effective way to draw on the right side of your brain and to trick your left side.
Today’s chair drawing was completed using this technique. Not perfect, as I still got caught up in the left side of my brain “telling me” what I saw. The chair leans, but I am getting better at showing perspective.
1% improvement every day.
Double Writing
Hey, my handwriting is a mess, sometimes unreadable and boring. Today’s Sketchbook Skool Art Bootcamp exercise is Double Writing from Andrea Joseph. Double writing is easy to add fun and flair to your lettering. She walks you through a four-step process to practice double writing.
Contour of the Keys
A contour drawing focuses on the edges of the object. Today’s exercise was to draw the contour of your keys without lifting your pen. The focus is on developing confident lines.
Doing it in pen, in this case, a Pilot Prera fountain pen) allows me to focus on the lines; there is no erasing or “starting over.”
After I set the contours, I went back and added the details. Excellent enjoyable exercise to start a Saturday morning.
Blind Contour by Feel
Today’s exercise was a blind contour by feel selfie. You place your finger on your nose, move around your face, and have your hand follow along. I like how my eyes are aligned and feel confident with my lines.
Another interesting exercise to develop confidence in my lines.
Blind Contour Drawing
Back to basics today.
I’m starting the Six-week Art Bootcamp class at Sketchbook Skool. This course is exciting. We start with pen and pencil on paper and work with colored pencils and watercolors.
Fun and exciting. I am looking forward to it. Today we completed a blind contour drawing. This technique is where you look at the subject only and let your hand follow your eyes.
I heard an excellent comment from author Neil Gaiman about writing in a new book, which is equally relevant to a new sketchbook. Remember, everything can be fixed except for a blank page. Draw on!
Water bottle
Here is a sketch of my personalized water bottle. It has been a while since I drew and posted something. I was thinking about where the friction has come from. As I have gone from pure novice to amateur, I have built unnecessary expectations. When you are a novice, you have no expectations and don’t self-judge what you are doing; you do it. When you arbitrarily cross over to amateur, you somehow develop expectations that lead to friction. Now I’m feeling somewhat disappointed in my drawings when I haven’t been practicing for very long.
Watch out for this arbitrary shift and the related increased expectations. The friction is not worth it.
Cup
I’m happy with the perspective on the cup’s top. I used the pencil measuring technique to measure the ellipse. The length vs. depth of the ellipse is much greater than your brain says it should be. That was key to getting the correct perspective. Today feels like a breakthrough day for me.
The overall balance of the cup’s sides is good. I am making progress one day at a time.
Morning Coffee
Here is a sketch of my morning coffee. I am still working on the perspective of the top. Still too round and doesn’t give the depth of the angle. I now realize this is my left brain telling me what I am seeing and what I should draw. Next time I need to use the picture plane to get it into a two-dimensional view.
Live Portrait Model
Drawing a two-dimensional portrait out of a book is tough, but a three-dimensional model is even more challenging.
You have the left brain interfering and dictating what you should see and draw, and your right brain trying to draw what you see. Putting all the learnings into practice is challenging. Therefore, this is a learned skill, not a God-given talent you have or don’t have.
It is tough, but I am continuing to work through it. I think I have made a 1% improvement from yesterday’s drawing to today.
Madame X
Today's drawing is day two of developing my portrait skills. Today was a warm-up exercise of drawing John Singer Sargent's Madam X. Focusing on the proportions and how the eyes, ears, and head proportions line up.
Putting aside what you see, people are even more alike than you think. There are infinite unique faces and features, but almost everyone is the same in many respects. For example, the eyes are halfway between the top of the skull and the chin, and the back of the eye to the back of the ear is the same distance as the front of the eye to the top of the head. In this crazy world, another example of what we have in common.
Learning the isosceles triangle of the head, eyes, and ears is fantastic. Progressing 1% a day.
Eyes Have It
After a break for health reasons, I am back working on and enjoying drawing. The next chapter of my Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain book course is portraits. The first section deals with proportions and precisely where the eyes fall o the skull.
Interestingly the eyes fall equidistant from the top of the head to the bottom of the chin. So even though our eyes (left brain) challenge this thought, it is accurate.
Today’s sketch is a basic shell with the axis and horizon drawn in on both the front and profile views of the head. I was getting comfortable with the placement of the eyes.
The Office Corner
Today’s sketch focuses again on the perspective skill. Using the picture plane, I drew my Basic Unit (the Formula One photography on the left of the corner) on my picture plane and then transferred that to my shaded paper.
From there, I drew the remaining elements. I’m happy with how I could draw the view to scale and didn’t run out of space on the page. Most everything in the view was captured to scale.
1% improvement!
The Corner
Today’s sketch focused on sighting the angles in a room corner with just a pencil. First, I drew the central vertical line, which always remains vertical regardless of the viewing angle. And then, using my pencil, I visually saw the angle for the floor and ceiling with the vertical corner.
Getting good and working these angles and tricking my left brain, which is convinced the lines are straight.
Focused on constant improvement day by day,