Take a moment to imagine your life after your career.
If you could choose just five words to describe the post-career phase of your life, what would they be?
Did you do it? If you haven’t yet, don’t read any further until you’ve completed this task. (No really…I’m serious.)
Did any of the following words make your list?
- Money
- Travel
- Fun
- Fulfilled
- Retirement
- Success
- Relax
- Happy
- Freedom
- Family
Chances are, you probably had a few of them on your list. No, I’m not psychic, despite having a rather impressive collection of oracle card decks and crystals on my bookshelf.
Let me tell you why those 10 words are significant. MIT’s AgeLab conducted this exact study in 2018. In the study, researchers asked subjects to do the exact same thing I just asked you to do: provide five words for how they imagined their “life after completion of career”
They specifically didn’t use the word ‘retirement’ to avoid possible bias. Those 10 words, relax, happy, travel, family, fun, success, freedom, money, and fulfilled accounted for 32% of responses.
So that’s a total of 10 words that accounted for 1/3 of responses and only 27 words accounted for 1/2 of the responses.
To put that into perspective, consider that the average person reading this has a vocabulary of about 42,000 words. The average 4-year old knows about 5000 words. Yet we use only 10 to describe our post-career lives. This is rather shocking, right?!
10 words to describe a period of life that will likely last as long as our full-time careers did. The study uncovered a very limited view of how we think about retirement life. It’s really not all that surprising when you think about how the media portrays retirement. Picture any commercial or advertisement about retirement life and you’ll see golfing, sailing, biking, traveling and long walks on the beach. But that’s a pretty limited view of a very significant period of life.
Money, Travel, Fun, Fulfilled, Retirement, Success, Relax, Happy, Freedom, Family
These words describe a vacation, NOT a retirement plan. And how we plan for retirement is influenced by what we think retirement is. If we think it’s all about money, rest, travel and relaxation, then we’re not really planning for what’s next.
Joseph Coughlin, the lead researcher on the MIT study stated that: “There are parrots with larger vocabularies than most of us have concerning life in old age”.
The limited vocabulary and imagery imply that we may not have a clear, or realistic, vision of retirement. The researchers went on to say that: “These findings have practical implications for the evolving roles of financial planners as curators, educators, and co-creators of retirement. Planners may have a new role as curators of possible lifestyles for clients to consider and plan for.”
That’s what I’m here to do – think of me as your retirement curator – helping you sift and sort through your life to find what is going to be uniquely meaningful for you when you leave your full-time career. As your retirement curator, it is my role to help you consider what you are retiring TO.
Maybe some of the words that you choose to describe your post-career life will include things like travel, freedom and family, but maybe this phase of your life could be so much more. I’m not saying that relaxing and fun shouldn’t be a part of your retirement life plan, but it’s only a small piece of the retirement puzzle.
What 5 words did you use to describe your post-career life? Leave a comment and let me know if they included the ones on the list. Don’t forget to follow me on socials following the links below to stay up to date on all of my latest news and updates.
As usual Tammy, you have got me thinking about this! Thank you!
So glad to hear this Loren! Let me know if you have any questions about anything ✨