Designing a Fulfilling Retirement: How Working with a Financial Advisor Can Help You Redefine Your Retirement

For some, retirement is a time of their lives they’ve been looking forward to for years. It offers a sense of freedom, an opportunity to remake themselves and time to spend with loved ones.

For others, it’s ominous. It’s something they want to avoid entirely. Retirement, in their minds, is the end of a meaningful life. Their career offered them a sense of purpose, of identity and in many cases a social circle. Retirement will take it all away.

Surveys suggest that some 40% of retirees fear retirement more than they do death.¹

So, what should you do if you find yourself in that 40%, or if you’re still working but are unsure what to make of your retirement years?

Our culture has an unfortunate mindset when it comes to retirement and growing old. Jerry Seinfeld encapsulated North America’s view on aging succinctly in his Netflix special 23 Hours to Kill: “I don’t want to grow. I don’t want to change. I don’t want to improve at anything. I don’t want to expand my interests, meet anyone or learn anything I don’t already know.”²

That’s retirement and aging in the Western sense—not growing, expanding or stretching to reach new goals or pursue exciting experiences. We slow down, we stagnate, we atrophy over time, trying to distract ourselves through various modes of entertainment as we crawl toward the bitter end.

Groundbreaking research from Dr. Becca Levy, an expert in psychology and successful aging, has studied the concept of how “age beliefs”—ideas we have about growing old that we’ve acquired through our culture over time and embedded in our subconscious minds—can dramatically affect our longevity. Her studies demonstrate that “age beliefs can add or steal nearly eight years to [or from] your life.”³

In other words, your thoughts about aging, and indeed retirement, have an impact on how gracefully you age.

To help you cultivate a positive outlook, you need to uncover goals you want to pursue in your post-career life. Goals are extraordinarily powerful, with several studies suggesting that people who live a meaningful, goal-oriented life slow the effects of aging on their minds and bodies.^4,5

Working with a financial advisor to complete our retirement lifestyle planning tool can help. This tool was designed using a combination of research on retirement and aging, along with our experiences in the field helping individuals define their retirement years. Once you’ve completed the exercise, you’ll have a full calendar of activities that will help you in your pursuit of the goals you’ve defined for yourself.

But goals, like life, change. Your retirement lifestyle plan, much like your financial plan, is meant to be adaptable. It is a living document you can change based on wherever your post-career life takes you.

It’s why we recommend completing the exercise with a financial advisor—because financial planning and retirement lifestyle planning are synergistic and highly complementary. Consider that those who work with a financial advisor tend to increase their consumption in later life by as much as 25%. That’s 25% more money to spend on experiences, hobbies and vacations.⁷

Also keep in mind that a recent survey found those who planned for retirement, versus those who didn’t, overwhelmingly described it as being fun, enjoyable and pleasurable.⁸

So, whether you’re nearing retirement and have no idea what it looks like, or you’re already retired and wondering if there’s more to it, talk to your financial advisor about retirement lifestyle planning to help you craft a meaningful retirement.

Sources:

1. Buffett, Jacques. “More frightening than death: fear & loathing in retirement.” zety.com. June 17, 2024.
2. Jerry Seinfeld on aging. December 31, 2021. [Video]. YouTube.
3. Levy, Becca. Breaking the Age Code: How Your Beliefs About Aging Determine How Long and Well You Live. HarperCollins, 2022. Kindle Edition, p. 8.
4. Jensen, L.A.. The Oxford Handbook of Human Development and Culture: An Interdisciplinary Perspective. Oxford University Press, 2014, p. 666–679.
5. Hill, P.L., Turiano, N.A. “Purpose in life as a predictor of mortality across adulthood.” Psychological Science, May 8, 2014.
6. Abdaal, Ali. “The Odyssey Plan revisited.” aliabdaal.com. November 4, 2022.
7. The Conference Board of Canada. “Saving for the future: impacts of financial advice on the Canadian economy.” ific.ca. June 25, 2020.
8. Merrill Lynch, Age Wave. “Leisure in retirement: beyond the bucket list.” agewave.com. May 2016.