Retirement is seen as the reward for finishing your career. After decades of toil, you can finally relax and do whatever you want. Following the traditional 40-ish year career path locks you into endless work, with your golden years being the light at the end of the tunnel. But there is another option: create a life you don’t need to retire from.
Put simply, creating a life you don’t need to retire from means bringing forward some of the benefits you receive in retirement. You may want more free time, a healthier relationship with work, or more time with loved ones. Whatever it is, intentionally designing the life you want makes you happier now, and helps offset drastic lifestyle changes that come with ending a long-term career.
With the right strategy, it’s possible to live the life you always wanted to live, right now. As with everything in life, there are sacrifices. But if life-work balance is important to you, then it’s a sacrifice I am sure you’ll be willing to make.
Welcome to the Work Series – my thoughts on how using the rules of life to our advantage allows us to maximise our chances of living a happy and healthy life.
What Is Retirement and What Does It Offer?
Retirement is usually described as the period of life after you finish working. In reality, it’s less a phase of your life and more a state of being. Retirement, in my eyes, is a state based purely on your financial situation.
You can retire once you have enough money accumulated in cash and investments to see you through for the rest of your life. It doesn’t matter if you retire at traditional retirement age, or are pursuing an early retirement strategy. The goal is the same for each: accumulate enough so that you never need to work a regular job again.
But why are we pursuing retirement at all? What benefits does retiring offer?
Time Sovereignty
Retirement offers you full control of your time.
This is by far the most important benefit of retirement. Gaining full sovereignty of your time allows you to spend your time as you see fit. Financial Independence is a legitimate method of attaining that time freedom earlier in life.
When your time isn’t governed by the whims of others, you have the freedom to become mighty and independent. It offers you the ability to pursue what matters to you – your health, relationships, and passions.
Rest
When you have control over your time, you can rest as much as is necessary. You no longer need to stress over your work. Health is often sacrificed in favour of career progression, leading us to unhealthy spending habits to cope with our lack of agency.
Retiring frees you from the burden of mandatory labour, and the stresses that come with it. This allows you to live a less intense lifestyle and prioritise your health.
Having time to maintain your physical, mental, and spiritual wellbeing is a huge benefit of retirement. That said, your health can’t be ignored throughout life either. Entropy threatens degeneration of your health throughout your life. As a result, it’s not something we can simply wait until retirement to work on.
Pursue Passions
When you control your time you can do whatever you want to do. For many people this may involve pursuing passion projects. Perhaps you have a hobby or craft idea that you didn’t have time to pursue during your career. Retirement offers you the ability to pursue that in a sustainable way.
It’s worth noting that many such pursuits can also make money. Generally speaking, anyone who is good enough at anything can leverage their skills to make money in some fashion. Those possessing such skills – who can use them in a manner that they control – may find themselves able to retire from traditional employment much earlier than others.
Care for Loved Ones
One of the biggest benefits of retirement is that it allows you to care for your loved ones.
We often have to sacrifice a lot throughout our careers. Time with our family, children, and friends is sacrificed in order to make the money we need. Once you have enough money, this is no longer an issue – unless your tastes are so extravagant that you are forced to work to appease them.
Not having to worry about money while you care for family members is priceless.
Why Can’t We Retire Earlier?
There are obvious benefits and privileges we have access to in retirement. Living a sustainable and healthy life, choosing work we love, and spending our time with the people that matter most to us sounds ideal.
So why do we wait until “traditional retirement age” to do these things?
Money
Put simply, most of us don’t have a choice. We need to trade our time for money in order to accumulate wealth and assets that provide for our needs. Work’s primary goal therefore becomes earning enough money to live off of.
This relationship with money and work becomes problematic the more we engage with it. It results in “earning money” becoming our only motivation for going to work. And if that work doesn’t provide enough money to support yourself now and in the future, this relationship becomes even worse. You encounter stress at home, you are forced to alter your spending habits, and you struggle to save towards your financial goals.
As we are forced to trade our time for money, it can be very easy to create an antagonistic relationship with work. In many cases, the work itself is demanding not just on our time but on our energy privacy and humanity. If you’re forced to do work you don’t enjoy, it’s only natural that you will have a negative reaction to doing it.
Bad Luck
Despite doing everything right, things can still go wrong. Nobody is immune to misfortune, and any of us can become undone by it.
Bad luck, at its extreme, will destroy our chances of living the life we want. But we must continue moving forward in spite of it.
All we can do is minimise our exposure to things that lead to the negative impacts of bad luck: reducing our consumption, separating our income from our time, and continuing to triumph over entropy and inflation.
Not Having a Plan
Retirement can often seem out of reach without a plan, especially to those later in life. The sheer amount of money needed to cover your expenses passively can be daunting.
Not taking your finances seriously when you’re younger can back you into a corner later on. Options rapidly decline as you age, and you lose the ability to compound the benefits of your decisions over the long term.
Staying in a job that provides for your current needs but not your future needs will lead to a complicated and stressful retirement. You need a plan to work out how you plan to increase your income and attain the freedom you desire.
Lack of Financial Literacy
Most of the above issues have a common root cause: a lack of understanding of how money works.
Without basic financial literacy, many people are doomed to make poor financial decisions. This leaves them open to falling for scams and bad advice, which puts them even further behind and makes them even more desperate to “catch up”.
It’s easy to make mistakes without knowing how to determine the value of money, time, and things, as well as understanding how investments work and how to access debt wisely.
A fulfilling retirement is often out of reach to those without this literacy. It affects career prospects, investment opportunities, and every way you can spend your money.
Money is essential for everyone, but there’s not enough emphasis placed on the importance of understanding how it works. This lack of understanding what locks people into a life they want to retire from, rather than a fulfilling life that meets their changing needs throughout.
How to Create a Life You Don’t Need to Retire From
Creating a life you don’t need to retire from doesn’t come easily. There are a few steps to live a life you love, and you don’t need to retire in order to make these positive changes.
After following these steps enough, you may find you didn’t want to retire at all.
Find Your North Star
Your North Star is your most important goal.
A good North Star is a driving force that empowers you to improve your life.
If you want a life you don’t need to retire from, you need to work towards exactly what it is you want. Living a life without having an ideal to move towards results in a directionless and chaotic life. A life that won’t make you happy.
Your North Star can be something that you can make sub-goals towards achieving. That way, you can continue to improve your circumstances as you move towards your goal.
The end result of your pursuit of your North Star shouldn’t be the achievement of a simple goal. It should be the cumulative effort of accomplishing many goals that all contribute to something greater.
Gain Control of Your Time
Living a life you love requires you to have control of your time.
You need to be making the rules about what you do day to day. If your time isn’t under your control, it’s under someone else’s.
An ideal life is one where we can do what we want with our time. This freedom allows us to make positive changes that lead us to our North Star.
Build a High-Value Skill Set
Controlling your time gives you the flexibility to learn new skills – skills that can help you reach your goals sooner.
Continuing to learn should be a part of your strategy, and is essential to making your ideal life possible. Your circumstances and the world around you will continuously change. You need to take advantage of new opportunities that mean you can maintain and improve your life.
Developing skills is how you make that happen. It’s the most impactful thing you can do to improve your circumstances. And you don’t need to retire in order to build your skill set. Create a small amount of flexibility in your life to learn new skills, then use them to maximise your earning potential.
Become The Conductor of Your Life
Working towards your goal by improving your skills and controlling your time puts you in the driver’s seat of your life.
The more you work towards your goal, the more power you have to make that goal a reality. The pursuit of freedom requires you to become mighty enough to realise it. The person you become is someone worthy of achieving the goal. But achieving the goal becomes a byproduct of the incredible life you now lead.
Become the director of your story. Become the conductor of your life’s symphony. Your ideal life will only come about through active goal setting, and a constant march towards that goal.
Closing
The active pursuit of a strong and direct goal will change your life.
If your goal is to live a life you don’t need to retire from, it requires intentional design and the freedom to control your time. Financial Independence is a powerful goal that makes this lifestyle a reality, but you need an ideal in mind beyond merely “saving a lot of money”.
Design your ideal life during your pursuit of financial freedom, not after achieving it.
If you are the conductor of your song, you have the power to change your destiny. Live in a way that allows you to access that power, and you will find your way to the life you always wanted.
Thank you for reading.
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