The thought of transitioning into retirement can bring people a lot of stress and the uncertainty about what that looks like can often leave people putting off their retirement. Most of us know to prepare financially for retirement, but what does retirement life actually look like and how do you make that transition as seamless as possible?

We begin here with part one of a three-part series on transitioning into retirement broken down by time from retirement. In this first part, we are focusing on the period of 5 to 10 years before you retire. We will discuss 4 key strategies to ensure a successful and transition and then provide 5 action steps you can start today to start your successful transition into this great phase of life!

When you think of the word retirement, sometimes you think of things like getting older, being useless or sitting on a beach drinking pina coladas all day long. Maybe you think about golfing three days a week or treating every day like a Saturday, but the reality is that it is a very hard transition. Going through this transition with some planning will take some effort and some changes in your habits and routines. If you plan well, you will find that you will definitely yield amazing results. And the opposite will likely happen if you leave it to chance and just show up. It can be disastrous. You could find yourself feeling rudderless with really no idea what to do every day.

The purpose of this post is to give you key strategies that you can use right now to ensure personal happiness and success in retirement.

Mark and I have learned a lot over the past years, and we’ve had our fair share of failures and successes. At this point we have a list of things we would do differently and a very long list of things we’ve learned.

First Strategy – PLANNING
“Why would I have to plan for my retirement?” Well, here’s the thing, you’ve had a long career; every day, every week, every month, every quarter, every year and maybe every five years were planned. We are all used to planning, and this retirement phase of your life may last 30 years, so why not start planning now? Our first recommendation would be to get a journal. This tool has been vital to our success, and we will talk more about it in our next post when you are one to five years out from retirement.

Second Strategy – UNDERSTANDING RISKS
“What risks are there in retirement?” We’ve extensively researched the “BIG THREE”.

1. The loss of identity. You no longer have the title of CEO or Sales Director on your business card or email. You are no longer a part of a team. Your personal brand has changed.
2. The loss your community. All of your friends, clients and situational friendships have changed. Your frequented restaurants, hotels, event venues have changed and that’s a big deficit.
3. The loss of a routine. More new free hours are coming your way. Now, extra time may feel liberating, however you have to figure out what to do with those free hours. We have a great video on YouTube we did on time in retirement (LINK HERE).

Third Strategy – FORMULATE A VISION
After starting to get familiar with the risks it’s important to start thinking about a vision for this next phase. If you’ve been following us for a while, you know we talk a lot about five pillars:

• Physical wellness
• Mental wellness
• Relationships
• Spouse/partner relationships
• Wisdom sharing

The sixth one we have identified is community and how to build a community for yourself during this phase. You don’t want to begin or endure retirement feeling alone. Five to ten years out, we want you to think about where you are with each of the pillars. Where are you with your physical health, mental wellness, relationships and so on?

Fourth Strategy – HABITS AND ROUTINES
Start thinking about your habits and routines and really drill down on what is serving you well what are you needing to quit? What are some new habits that you might want to pull into your retirement and into this next phase of life? What’s your favorite part of the day? Our morning routine during our career was to get up, have a cup of coffee, watch a little news and handle as many emails as we could before we would get the kids off to school. Your first Monday after retirement when you’re just sitting there as empty nesters like we were can be challenging.

Start thinking about what your morning routine is now and maybe start to change it up so that you are better prepared. Take stock of the habits and routines that you have now and think about how they are going to translate into retirement. An example would be perhaps you had a habit of going out to dinner to entertain clients and the first thing you would do is order a bottle of wine. If that habit continued every time you went out to dinner during retirement, you’d be drinking an awful lot of wine. Think about it more deeply, is that a habit that you want to pull into the next several years or save it for more special occasions.
If you work on these four strategies over the next five to ten years, you will gain some clarity on what your retirement will look like. You will contemplate what you should worry about and what you are excited about. You also will likely gain a higher sense of what retirement success is going to look like and it will help you to drill down what your purpose and passions are.

Purpose and passion are very different during retirement. Instead of work goals, we are talking more about what are you going to live for?

You don’t want to just let life happen, you want to be in control of your life, which takes courage. You will be able to own your calendar, own your days and the good news is that you have years to work that out.

5 ACTION STEPS YOU CAN TAKE NOW

1. Meet and hire a financial planner. We can’t emphasize this enough, even if you’re a financially responsible individual and manage your investments well, it is best to have an outside independent third party to be involved. You need assurance to know that you have enough money to retire.
2. If you’re married or you have a partner, begin communicating about your vision for retirement. You can’t wait until the day after you walk out of your office to start to convey your vision to your partner or spouse. Many couples fail with this; they both had jobs, they spent their weekends and nights together and all of a sudden they are together all day long. More challenging is when the wife has one vision and the husband has another. You could have different visions on physical wellness or relationships… the key is to start talking about it now.
3. Think about how you are going to show up in the five pillars we mentioned. So what do we mean by showing up? How are you going to enter retirement physically, mentally, in your relationships, etc.
4. Call some of your retired friends. Ask questions about what they are doing, what brings them joy and find out about where they are struggling. They are a great resource for you and can help you to begin thinking about your own strategies.
5. Begin a discussion about downsizing, or we could call it right-sizing. This is another area where families run into trouble. Start imagining what life could be. If you’ve got the big five bedroom house with full bathrooms for all of the kids, what happens when they leave the nest? Do you really need a house that big? Maybe you do for future visits, etc. The idea here is to start to think about that decision now. Knowing is better than not knowing. Maybe you want a stronger sense of community and relocating or rightsizing to a different home will bring you a new opportunity.

As we leave you with the first phase of transitioning into retirement, we offer three books to read to get you thinking in the right headspace for planning your retirement:
• Second Mountain by David Brooks
• The Way of Transition by William Bridges
• The Five Love Languages by Gary Chapman

Start talking with your spouse or partner about your retirement goals today. Have an open dialogue and really listen to one another’s goals. With some effort and planning you will be able to take some real action and enter this phase with a whole successful strategy laid out for a happy retirement!

Click here to watch our YouTube series on Transitioning into Retirement.