Last week I attended a retirement seminar at our local senior center. The moderator said we would be covering every aspect of retirement, except for money. Topics included how to find new meaning in life, what to do with your time and whether to stay in your old home or relocate to a retirement mecca. And yet, the most important lesson I took away from the seminar hit the question of money right on the head.
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The lesson doesn’t involve any practical tips, like downsizing your living quarters, paying off your mortgage or starting to sell your old furniture on eBay and your new craft projects on Etsy. It involved an attitude adjustment. When the moderator asked for questions, comments or personal stories about how people handled retirement, one fellow stood up. He was in his mid-to-late 60s and dressed in casual, unremarkable clothes. He apologized, saying his wife was a volunteer helping at the senior center, so maybe he shouldn’t be talking. But he just wanted to add one thing to the discussion about starting a new life in retirement.
He told us that he had retired from a computer company about three years ago. He used to run a department, and he had a number of people reporting to him. He said he’d been there for 40 years and made a pretty good salary. He confessed that he had spent most of it on a house, new cars, travel and his kids. Yes, he had funded his retirement accounts, but he was still a little worried about having enough money to maintain his lifestyle throughout retirement.
But the real problem, he said, was that after he retired he felt disconnected. He had no purpose in life, no focus. For the first few months he would go with his wife to the grocery store and follow her up and down the aisles, until one day she leveled a look at him and said, “This has got to stop.”
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Still, he didn’t know what to do. When he was working he had places to go, people to see and a schedule to keep. Now he had nothing. When he was working, he had performance reviews, which gave him a kind of report card on his life. He got raises and a few promotions, and had the money to buy most of the things he wanted. He began to realize that his job had defined his life. He could tell people where he worked, and took some pride in that, and in a sense he “kept score” by how much money he made and how many people reported to him. But now he needed a new role in life, a new focus, a new way to evaluate how he was doing.
He realized that he had to come up with a different way to define himself and a different way to keep score. He considered taking up golf or fishing, but when he really thought about it, he realized that didn’t interest him. But he knew he had certain skills, and prompted by his wife, he decided he could apply those skills to help people around town. So he talked to a friend, who suggested he attend a meeting of the men’s club, and that eventually led to Meals on Wheels. So today, he spends two afternoons a week delivering meals to senior citizens. He also found himself at the library last winter, helping seniors do their taxes. Then in the summer he checked out the Volunteer Match website, and was linked up to volunteer with Habitat for Humanity.
Last year he and his wife sold their house and moved into a condominium. He was tired of taking care of his yard and repairing things around the house, and he instead was finding much more satisfaction spending time with his new friends in town. He and his wife don’t travel much anymore. They haven’t bought a new car since they traded in the family SUV for a Honda sedan almost ten years ago.
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He doesn’t miss his house, or the travel. And he doesn’t worry about his finances anymore. Why? Because now he defines himself as a volunteer, rather than a computer programmer, and he keeps score not by how much money he makes and spends, but by how many people he has helped. “I think about what I want people to say at my funeral,” he said. “And I decided nobody was even going to care how much money I made or what my title was at work. I want them to talk about the people I have helped and the impact I made on my community.”
Tom Sightings is the author of “You Only Retire Once” and blogs at Sightings at 60.
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Retirement: An Attitude Adjustment originally appeared on usnews.com
