Retirement!
What do you think of when you hear this word: Retirement
Let’s play another game – take a minute and fill in these blanks:
- Retirement is ________________________________
- When I retire, I see myself ______________________
- When I retire, I will feel ________________________
In a 1995 study out of the University of Montana, Stephen Phillips and Betsy Bach studied metaphors that people use when describing retirement. Their research found that 52% of respondents used metaphors of transition or emotion to describe retirement. For example, one participant described retirement as a transition into a different world or starting a second life. Digging deeper into these initial responses, they found a common theme in this group that centered around uncertainty. In other words, for over half of the people studied, retirement is a transition that involves uncertainty.
On the opposite side, their research found that 29% of respondents used a metaphor of freedom to describe retirement. For this group, the common theme centered around lack of pressure and freedom of time. In other words, one-third of people in this study said retirement is freedom from pressure and time.
How does this study compare to your answers above? Perhaps to some degree a combination of both uncertainty and freedom describe how you feel about retirement.
Creating a retirement plan and multi-year roadmap is a great way to quell the uncertainty that surrounds retirement. What does your current financial and retirement plan look like? Has it been updated recently? Similar to getting a physical from your doctor every few years, frequently updating your retirement plan is a best practice to make sure you’re on the right road to meet your goals. If you don’t have a plan, I invite you to get one. If your roadmap has accumulated a little dust, come in for a check-up.
Retirement is great. When I retire, I see myself continuing to work on my passion projects. When I retire, I will feel the freedom to use my time as I please.
Let’s get a plan in place to make this happen.
