Planning for Retirement in Your 60s — Beyond the Financial Plan
How to think about purpose, identity, work and what you want from the next stage of your life.
When people start planning for retirement, they tend to begin with the financial questions.
Do we have enough money to enjoy a comfortable retirement? When can we afford to stop working? What will our pensions and savings provide?
These are important questions, and many people quite rightly work with a financial adviser to help answer them. But there is another part of retirement planning that can be just as important — and sometimes considerably harder to answer:
What do I actually want the next stage of my life to look like?
For someone who has spent 30 or 40 years building a successful career, that question can lead to some surprisingly difficult moments of introspection:
Now that I’m no longer working full-time, who am I without my job title?
Which of the skills and experience I’ve accumulated might be useful in my next chapter?
If I retire in my 60s, what is going to give my days purpose and get me out of bed in the morning?
How will I replace the structure, stimulation and social contact that work has provided?
These aren’t primarily financial questions. But they can have just as much influence on whether the next stage of life feels rewarding.
Retirement is more than a financial transition
Ending a full-time career represents one of life’s major transitions.
For much of our adult lives, a surprising amount of our identity and structure can come from work. There are meetings to attend, problems to solve, people who need us, deadlines to meet and a reason to get up on Monday morning.
Work also provides status, relationships, intellectual stimulation and a ready answer to the familiar question: “What do you do?”
Remove that structure and the freedom can be exciting. But it can also be disorientating.
In my coaching work with people on the cusp of leaving full-time careers, I’ve found that the financial plan is often considerably clearer than the life plan.
Asking can therefore represent a significant — and sometimes unexpected — moment of reflection.
Life After 50….
We are living longer, and many of us can expect a substantial period of healthy and active life after leaving full-time employment, sometimes in our 50s.
Someone who leaves a full-time career in their late 50s or early 60s could potentially have another 20 years or more in which to work, learn, contribute, build relationships and pursue interests.
That changes the question.
Instead of simply asking “When should I retire?”, it may be more useful to ask:
“What do I want to do with the next 20 years?”
For many people, the answer isn’t simply to stop working, but at the same time, you may have little appetite for replacing one demanding career with another role, carrying the same pressures, politics and long hours.
So what are the alternatives?
They might include part-time work, consultancy, a portfolio career, mentoring, trustee or non-executive roles, volunteering, learning something new, starting a small business — or a combination of several of these.
There doesn’t have to be a single answer.
You don’t need to have it all worked out
One of the difficulties with planning life after a successful career is the feeling that you ought to know what you want to do next.
But why should you?
You may be trying to imagine a life that is very different from the one you’ve spent decades building.
This is why I place considerable emphasis on experimentation in my coaching.
Rather than trying to create the perfect five-year plan, try things. Have conversations with people outside your existing professional network. Explore an interest. Volunteer. Take a course. Investigate a trustee role. Try some consultancy. Reconnect with someone doing something that interests you.
Some experiments will lead somewhere. Others won’t. That’s not failure. The value is in what you learn from doing them. Experimentation can help turn the rather intimidating question
“What am I going to do with the rest of my life?” into the much more manageable question: “What would I like to try next?”
Planning For Life After Retirement
Coaching doesn’t involve somebody telling you what you should do with your retirement.
A good coach creates the space and structure to explore questions that can otherwise remain surprisingly easy to postpone.
What matters to me now? What do I want more of — and less of? Which parts of my working life do I want to retain? What am I ready to leave behind? Where could my experience still be useful? What would I like to explore simply because I’m curious about it?
The answers will be different for everyone.
And they don’t necessarily need to result in another job or another impressive title. A rewarding next chapter might combine paid work, family, learning, contribution, travel, friendships and interests in proportions that would have been impossible during a full-time career.
Financial planning can help establish what is possible. The next challenge is deciding what you want to make possible.
Perhaps, then, one of the most useful questions to ask as you approach retirement isn’t simply:
"When can I afford to retire?”
but:
“What do I want the next 20 years of my life to contain?”
About the author
Edward Sharp is the founder of StayCurious Coaching, helping people approaching or leaving successful careers work out what they want their next chapter to look like.
