My husband and I are planning to retire in around five years’ time, and we keep having the same conversation. It usually hinges around the things we’ll miss when work no longer calls.
What will we do with our time? Will we suddenly take up golf and spend endless hours at coffee mornings? Or, as we live in France, will we be out enjoying a “menu du jour” most days with a glass or two of rosé?
All joking aside though, there are some things to consider when making the decision to retire that have nothing to do with money, funds or Medicare. The things nobody really talks about because it’s usually more about affording to retire than being ready for it.
7 Retirement Surprises That Never Make It Into the Spreadsheet
It’s funny because we all work hard to build our retirement fund. We spend many happy hours daydreaming about what we’ll do with our time and how we’ll be able to do all the things we’ve not been able to.
However, the reality is a little different. My next-door neighbor here in France has recently retired. He used to live in Berlin and use his French house as a holiday home. He’s now given up his city apartment in Berlin and is living full-time in France, and we’ve had some interesting conversations about the things he misses, apart from the monthly paycheck.
1. Your Purpose In Life
We all need structure in our lives, a purpose and a reason to get up in the morning. I remember when we first moved to France, my husband wasn’t working for the first year and he really struggled.
Your career decides where you go, who you see, which problems land on your desk, and gives you a schedule or tasks for the day. Take that away and, for a while, relief runs the show. Nobody’s chasing you for a decision, the phone stays quiet, and a Tuesday morning is entirely yours.
The trouble starts when the plan assumes that removing the obligation is the same thing as building the satisfaction. It isn’t. Work took up thousands of hours a year, and its absence leaves a large piece of life that has to be designed rather than handed to you.
The answer doesn’t have to be another job. A house project, a garden, a community board, a proper travel plan, caring for a grandchild, a bit of consulting, or a serious hobby. Any of these can give you the structure we crave as humans, but without the pressure that comes with a job. What you’re after is a handful of things that matter enough that Wednesday feels different from Sunday and the days don’t all just roll into one.
2. The Daily Routine
The alarm clock is one of the first casualties, and for the first few weeks it feels like the best decision you ever made. Nobody warns you that the work schedule was also making about 40 small decisions on your behalf every day.
When to get up, when to eat, when to leave the house, when to see other people, when to focus, when to stop. All decided for you, and all invisible until they’re no longer there.
Once the cues disappear, everything becomes negotiable, which sounds glorious until it’s 12:30 and you haven’t quite decided what the day was for. I’m not talking about scheduling yourself into 30-minute blocks like you’re back at work; more like a few anchors to hold the week together.
Something physical a couple of mornings a week, a standing coffee date, a volunteer shift, a routine time you sort the house or the yard, a weekend outing that’s on the calendar.
Adults 65 and older have a huge new pot of discretionary time compared with what they had at 55, and that pot has to be spent on something. An empty calendar feels like heaven when you’re burnt out. Once the recovery period is over, the same empty calendar just looks like a sea of nothingness unless you have plans in place to help with it.
3. Your Professional Identity
For most of a working life, introductions come with a job attached. You’re a nurse, a teacher, an engineer, a plumber, a physician, a manager, a bookkeeper, someone who runs a small business.
Then you retire and the sentence changes tense. For anyone whose work carried status, expertise, or pride, that little grammatical shift can feel bigger than the people around you realize.
Retirement doesn’t automatically trigger an identity crisis, and plenty of older workers actually look forward to the change. Having identities and groups outside work makes a real difference to that transition.
But you aren’t just a job title. When I sold one of my businesses a few years ago, I was terrified because I suddenly felt like I didn’t know who I was anymore. Where had my identity gone? I’m making it sound dramatic, but to me it was, and I know, from having chatted with Simon, my next-door neighbor, he felt exactly the same.
However, I soon realized I’m so much more than the sum of my career. I’m a mother, a grandma, a wife, a neighbor, a friend, a halfway decent home cook, and a damn good pianist. None of that was ever on my business card.
The trap is when the career identity crowded almost every other identity out over 30 years, and there’s very little left in the other columns. The preparation worth doing before you retire is building up the number of true answers you have when someone asks what you do with your time.
4. The Automatic Social Life
You don’t have to love your coworkers to be getting a steady social diet from work. There are the hallway chats, the lunch invitations, the customer who always tells you about her dog, the joke before the meeting starts, the person who notices when you’re off sick. Dozens of small human contacts a week that suddenly stop.
Most of those disappear the day you leave. Colleagues genuinely mean to stay in touch, and some do, but the shared schedule and problems that pulled everyone into the same building aren’t pulling them together anymore.
Research on social isolation in later life is clear that big life transitions can disrupt established routines and contact patterns, which means social connection deserves as much thought in your retirement plan as travel or healthcare, as it’s just as important.
Which is one reason “we’ll spend more time together” can’t be the whole social strategy for a couple. One partner can’t reasonably stand in for coworkers, friends, activity partners, mentors, and casual acquaintances all at once.
Better to build a few layers. A weekly walking group for light company, one or two old friends for the deeper conversations, a volunteer role that puts you in a room with people of different ages and backgrounds. The workplace was doing this on autopilot for you. Now you have to be the one who sets it up.
5. Feeling Needed
Work is exhausting partly because people constantly want things from you. An answer, a decision, a fix, a signature, a call back, a report by Friday. For the first few weeks of retirement, not being at everyone’s beck and call feels amazing.
Give it a few months, though, and a lot of retirees find that being free from responsibility and feeling useful isn’t quite what they imagined. So, you need to create the need for yourself.
Maybe that’s watching a grandchild once a week, driving a neighbor to their appointment, helping at the food pantry, mentoring somebody younger in your old field, chairing a small committee at church, keeping an eye on a friend who’s just had surgery.
What you’re replacing here is the small daily proof that your presence changes something for somebody else. That’s a real need, and it doesn’t switch off at 65. Building a couple of standing commitments where people are counting on you, at your own pace and on your own terms, is one of the more underrated moves in a retirement plan.
6. The Deadline Graveyard
I don’t know about you, but I work well under pressure with deadlines looming. It’s not for everyone, I know, but I do my best work when I know I have a deadline to meet.
Interestingly, deadlines are the thing everybody says they can’t wait to be rid of. Fair enough, given how many of them are somebody else’s emergency landing on your desk. But deadlines also turned intentions into finished things. The report got written because Friday existed. The proposal went out because the client was waiting.
Without an external clock, the deck you were going to build, the book you were going to write, and the trip you were going to book can drift for years as vague intentions.
Some retirees find themselves making up their own deadlines just to get anything across the finish line. Booking the flights first and figuring out the itinerary after. Signing up for a class that meets on Tuesdays so Tuesday becomes real again. Agreeing to host Thanksgiving so the yard actually gets tidied by November.
Retirement needs to be designed the same way as your career did; the difference is that it’s completely on your own terms. You’ve spent decades reacting to other people’s timelines, and the muscle for setting your own has probably atrophied a bit.
7. The Sense Of Achievement
There is nothing better than ticking something off your To Do List. The satisfaction you feel when you’ve completed a project or task can’t be understated. In working life, you knew when you’d done something. You’d closed the file, seen the last patient, sent the invoice, taught the class, handed over the shift. There was a natural marker for a day well spent.
In retirement, nobody hands you that marker. You can have a perfectly good day, potter about, read for an hour, do a load of laundry, meet a friend for coffee, and still get to 9 pm feeling like nothing happened.
Not because nothing happened, but because there was no clear point when the day said, “right, that counted.”
To combat this, try making a short mental list at the end of the day of the things you achieved, started, or completed. A walk, a book finished, fence mended, a call to a sibling, some batch cooking, or even the weeding of a flower bed.
The paycheck was one way of being told your day mattered. It wasn’t the only way, and building the habit of noticing on your own is one of the small skills that separates a retirement that fits from one that sort of floats without any real purpose or sense of achievement.