Get on the right road to retirement

Retirement can be disorienting. Finally, your time is all your own, but do you have a plan? Retirement counsellor Barry LaValley talks about self-actualisation with John McCrone.

What is retirement? For too many, the word simply signals a deliverance from work, the start of ‘‘the 30-year weekend’’, says Canadian retirement psychologist, Barry LaValley. People don’t really think it through. ‘‘They drift into it. They know what they’re retiring from, but not what they’re retiring to.’’

Subconsciously, he says, much of the imagery comes from advertising – chirpy silver-haired couples walking a coastal path or tapping another golf ball down a sunlit fairway.

‘‘That’s the plan. All they need is a date to retire and a dollar number that will give them a good life, because people think they will be doing in retirement what they’ve always done on holidays or weekends. That’s their picture of the happy retirement.’’

LaValley shakes his head. In New Zealand to promote a book aimed at Kiwi retirees, LaValley says retirement is tough because you actually have to invent your own new life.

The real issues to face are more emotional than financial. And the time to start thinking through the changes is probably back when you are still in your 50s.

But, first off, LaValley says, New Zealand is in fact a great place for retirees. It deserves its second spot (Iceland ranks top) in accountant PwC’s Golden Age Index of OECD countries. For one thing, most Kiwis avoid blundering into one of the big retirement mistakes. LaValley says the idea that retirement ought to be understood as the beginning of a perpetual holiday leads North Americans especially to migrate to their favourite vacation destinations.

But New Zealanders by contrast mostly retire in place.

This also means they stay close to family and friends, as well as to the possibilities of continuing in work and being usefully engaged in a familiar community. So mistake No 1 is avoided.

However, accidental choices are not plans. What then are the essential things people should be considering?

LaValley says most of his advice is just commonsense. An important thing to understand is that retirement itself is going to break into a fairly natural sequence of moments or transitions. He can list about eight.

Before retirement, there is the distant fantasy, followed by the increasing anticipation. Work is coming to an end. You are about to embark on an age where your time is suddenly all your own. Then retirement actually starts. There will be a honeymoon stage of a few years, which is usually going to be a mix of excitement and stress. There will be the novelty, which is fun. But also the disorientation of the sudden loss of structure and responsibilities. Psychologists call this the rush-crash phase, LaValley says. Those with money are using it to fill their time with activities.

‘‘People tend to spend like drunken sailors in the first few years.’’

Yet it also becomes plain that retirement is not a destination – a place where everything is sorted out for you. Life continues. And this can lead to an odd form of discontent.

‘‘One of the biggest sources of stress in retirement is the lack of such structure – the stress of not having anything you must do, not having demands on you.’’

Most people of course do establish some new routine for themselves. After about three years typically, they are into another stage when the initial buzz has long worn off and they are into their new day-to-day. This will in turn run along smoothly until inevitably there is a challenge to trigger the next transition. Ill-health, the death of a partner, a family or financial crisis. The result can be a serious disenchantment with life. Some people never pull out of it, says LaValley. But hopefully most pick themselves up, reorientate and rebuild.

The point is not that all these phases follow one another automatically, he says. It just illustrates it should be expected that retirement is going to be journey, especially one of psychological adjustments.

Five keys to retirement success

There is the irony. The biggest gift of retirement is supposed to be free time. And that is the bit retirees will want to figure out the fastest, says LaValley.

It is the life stage when you can be doing whatever it is you really most want to be doing. The focus can switch from the material to the emotionally or spiritually satisfying. But, LaValley says, few people are used to being ‘‘selfactualising’’ in this way – able to create their own chosen life structure based on their deepest values. The rule of thumb is that 90 per cent of us are other-directed rather than self-directed.

‘‘Other directed means your happiness appears dependent on external things, not things you generate‘‘

LaValley says looking to external change to be the answer is what produces a dissatisfied ‘‘grass is always greener’’ mentality. When working, you can’t wait to stop. Then once you stop, you mourn the loss of everything work gave. With leisure your new norm, it loses its lustre pretty fast. Activities can be just timefilling rather than fulfilling.

Again, it is commonsense advice, says LaValley. Yet still, how do you learn the knack of becoming a self-actualising individual?

Positive psychology sees authentic happiness in terms of the handy acronym, PERMA. So ‘‘P’’ for positive attitude – where first you have decided to take definite charge of your fate, LaValley says. Then engagement, where you see that retirement shouldn’t be some kind of retreat from life. And relationships, as they matter most. Then meaning, as there is no point in engaging with life and people unless it is personally meaningful and so actually fulfilling. Finally achievement, as that is the desired outcome – feeling good about the results.

‘‘Those are the five keys to retirement success. And note none of them are to do with where you live, or what you spend, but what you do and the people you are around.’’

So find new hobbies, take up volunteering and good causes. The standard advice, LaValley says. However the tricky part may be discovering what you truly value.

He says the instinctive response of most people is that family is their most important thing. Retirement means they might thus devote themselves to that. Yet everyone knows grandparenting can be a source of tension as much as pleasure.

LaValley says when people dig deeper, it is usually the general humanistic values – altruism, nurturing, giving – that are their bedrock.

So family might be one expression of that. However, the same values can be served in many other ways. It just takes realising that this is your general goal in retirement.

LaValley says bear in mind just fitting routine into the week is still going to fill it. A steady schedule of appointments, exercise classes, housework and all the rest. ‘‘It is going to be a continuation of ordinary life as well.’’

Also, when people do stop to think about their real priorities, work does become something they may recognise as something they will miss.

This is another reason why he envies New Zealand, where the possibility to stay on in the labour force is supported both by Kiwi culture and official policy.

‘‘A study in Canada found among entrepreneurs and self-employed people who retired before 65, 70 per cent of them returned to work within two years.’’

People want to feel occupied and valued for what they do. The age of 65 is an extremely arbitrary line to draw across a life, says LaValley. Most would rather just transition to less demanding work, or more rewarding work.

Start thinking 20 years earlier

Of course retirement thinking also has to include the negatives. LaValley says major set-backs like health problems are always going to strike.

And, while the baby boomer generation plans to reinvent retirement – it already loves the idea of selfactualising – it is also true that it brings with it a much higher load of life abuse than it tends to realise.

LaValley says boomers think they are in a fitter and healthier state at retirement than their parents ever were. A good start in life and the advances of medical science have meant they have escaped serious disease on the whole.

However, indulgent diets, sedentary occupations and mental stress are catching up on them. Typical surveys show boomers are 30 per cent more obese, 46 per cent more likely to have diabetes and 38 per cent more likely to have high blood pressure than the generation before them.

This reality has to be factored into any retirement plan. And again, 45 or 50 might be a better time to be think ahead about that. So his advice is straightforward. The danger is in drifting towards retirement with little more than the thought that it signals simply an end to work, the start of some vague prospect of a 30-year weekend.

LaValley says it is your third stage of life, where you get to act on what really matters to you. But to make the most of the opportunity is what takes a fair bit of self-discovery and self-organisation.

❚ So You Think You Are Ready To Retire?, by Barry LaValley with Cambridge Partners NZ