Ready for a Retirement Lifestyle? These Steps Can Help You Prepare

Retiring realigns your lifestyle as well as your finances. Days without meetings and other employment obligations may sound like a perfect life. Yet the reality is more complicated.

Research shows that advance planning on how your days might be filled, and on other “softer” aspects of your new life, increases the odds you’ll be happy in your post-career years. However, studies also suggest that people approaching retirement are less likely to do such planning than they are to focus on the financial realities of this next chapter. 

One reason might be a lack of resources and advice to help you shape your retirement lifestyle. Many professionals, organizations and media outlets offer guidance and tools on planning your finances once the paychecks end. The same isn’t true when it comes to envisioning the non-financial side of retirement. 

The following questions aim to kick-start the process of simply and tangibly building your retirement lifestyle. 

Talk to retirees you trust

Assuming you trust their judgment, the most useful resources when it comes to what retirement is like are people who have already retired. Ahead of your last days of work – or even ahead of the decision to retire – talk with retirees you know about their lives. 

Questions could include: Do you have a typical day or week? If so, describe it, and why each activity engages you. What parts of your new life remain challenging or unfulfilled?  In hindsight, are there any steps you wish you’d taken ahead of retiring that might have reduced those challenges? 

Make a list of possible retirement pursuits

When considering a new job, you'd never accept the offer without first gaining a clear and detailed understanding of its responsibilities and day-to-day activities. Yet plenty of retirees enter their post-work years with only the vaguest idea – or little idea at all – of what might occupy their time. 

Set yourself a task of writing down your lifestyle goals and ideas for things that might fulfill them. Consider creating a grid that lists the major categories of activity – including work, recreation, travel, volunteer opportunities and more – that you do now or aspire to do in retirement. For existing categories, express the amount of change you’d like, perhaps using plus and minus signs applied to each. 

Then fill in specific activities to meet those goals, especially in the biggest change categories. For example, if your plans include a desire to exercise more, you might list a priority to join a gym or seek a tennis partner. 

To get help with the overall process, search online for a "non-financial lifestyle planning template.” That request should yield some sites with free templates or exercises to guide you.

If such an exercise is too fussy for your taste, go simpler. Even a plain list of potential new retirement activities, kept and periodically updated within a Google Doc or mobile notes app, can accomplish some of the same benefits as a structured approach. 

Share your plan with friends and family 

The people you’re closest to can, of course, be invaluable sounding boards, even if they haven’t retired. These friends and relations know you best, after all. They can flag possible activities that are missing from your list – and maybe nix those that don't sound like your style, too. 

In particular, involve your spouse in your post-retirement lifestyle planning. Your partner should, of course, be in the loop on your plans for the financial side of your retirement. But lifestyle changes you make in retirement could also affect your relationship. Together with your spouse, consider such questions as whether, and how much, each of you may travel solo, and how retirement might or should change your respective household responsibilities. 

Prepare to shift from earning to spending 

Getting to the point, financially, of being able to afford retirement often involves years of saving and scrimping. Financial planners say some of their clients then have difficulty with the abrupt transition from amassing wealth and being frugal, to spending it, especially on nonessential items. 

The reluctance to spend, even on a retirement you’ve saved for, may stem from concern over how long the nest egg will actually last. That’s a worry a financial planner can help you overcome. 

But an unwillingness to spend may also require changes to your emotions and inhibitions about money. One way to increase your comfort with spending is to redefine your concept of investment. Allowing yourself to see some investments as non-financial in nature can help you see the value or necessity of spending. 

For example, let’s say you’re suddenly reluctant to take an expensive trip you planned for retirement, despite having ample funds to do so. It might help to reframe the outlay not as spending but as a different kind of investment – one that invests in your well-being, through having met a retirement goal or a bucket-list item.