Who are you when the job title is gone?
And in The Times this week 'How to overcome the fear that ruins retirements'
In this week’s edition:
Feature story: Who are you when the job title is gone?
The Times: How to overcome the fear that ruins retirements
From Bec’s Desk: A new on-demand Epic Retirement UK course launches today plus Epic Retirement the book is 99p in July!
Who are you when the job title is gone?
Nobody warns you about the day you walk away from your job title.
The retirement conversation, the one that fills books and seminars and financial planning appointments, is almost entirely about money - pensions and tax. How much you need. When you can leave. Whether the number is big enough. Whether you’ve done the sums correctly.
And then people get there, they do the sums and they do leave. And somewhere in the first weeks or months of retirement, usually on a quiet Tuesday morning when the diary is empty and there’s nowhere to be, no-one to talk to - and a question surfaces that nobody prepared them for.
Who am I now?
Not what will I do - that’s the ‘busy’ version of the question, and it’s easier to answer. Who am I. Without the role and without the title. Without the structure that told me, every single day for forty years, where I belonged and what I was worth.
It sounds like ingratitude, which is why people don’t say it out loud. You’ve worked your whole life for this freedom. You’re supposed to be relieved. And you are - and also, underneath the relief, quite destabilised in a way you weren’t expecting and can’t quite explain to anyone who hasn’t been through it.
This is more common than you think
Research on retirement wellbeing consistently finds that the people who struggle most in the transition aren’t the ones who ran out of money. They’re the ones who ran out of identity. Who built a sense of self so thoroughly inside their career that when the career ended, they didn’t know quite who was left.
And this is an entirely logical result of spending four decades in systems that rewarded you for for making work central to your life, for letting the job define the schedule and the relationships and the sense of purpose and the answer to the question people ask at dinner parties. What do you do?
When the answer to that question changes, more changes with it than most people anticipate.
The people who navigate it well
Here’s what the research shows, and what I’ve seen over and over again in the people who make the transition look almost easy.
They didn’t find their identity after they left work. They built it before they went.
They cultivated friendships that had nothing to do with the office. They stayed curious about things that had no career application whatsoever. They developed skills or practices or contributions that existed entirely outside their professional life and not as retirement hobbies they were saving up for one day, but as things that mattered to them now, that gave them a sense of self that didn’t depend on a salary to survive.
They answered the question who am I outside of this job while they were still in it. And they built up things over time. Which meant that when the job ended, the answer was already there, waiting.
So if you’re still in the run-up
The best retirement planning you can do right now isn’t just financial. It’s asking yourself - honestly, not in a bucket-list way but in a Tuesday-morning way, who you are outside of what you do for a living.
Not who you want to be, who you are. What you care about. What you’d do if nobody was watching and nothing counted toward a performance review. What kind of person shows up when the job title is removed from the introduction.
That person is going to need to be enough some day very soon. And the good news is that for most people - once they’ve had the space to actually meet them - they are.
More than enough, as it turns out.
I have two bits of fun news:
The UK Edition of How to Have an Epic Retirement is Kindle 99p Book of the Month! Seriously! You can pick up a copy on Amazon Kindle for 99p in the month of July. So don’t wait - get in there. Get your copy here.
The last week of the Epic Retirement UK Course pilot has gone so well that we’ve flipped it into an on-demand program you can access when it suits you to do the course. You can purchase your ticket and complete it here. It’s an on-demand program now that runs for six weeks from whenever you start it.
It includes:
6 weeks of online retirement lessons (14 modules of lessons)
Access to our recorded online Q&As (3 of them - we recorded them during the pilot)
An invitation to 4 live Q&A events over the year ahead with retirement experts - we will develop a calendar of events for our program attendees - held at least quarterly, if not more frequently.
A digital Conversation Starter workbook
Fully integrated activities that bring the course to life
A digital copy of How to Have an Epic Retirement - The UK Edition
The testimonials from our pilot program are brilliant - and a little bit humbling! Thank you to everyone who joined the pilot!
This course really helped me to feel in control in my retirement and removed the slight anxieties I had when it came to my finances for that period. Now I know what to ask a financial adviser, how to proportion my finances and how to enjoy my epic retirement!
If you don’t know how or when to retire and are confused about the financial and personal aspects of this then do consider doing this course. It is grounded in evidence and science, with practical exercises and helps you to identify a way forward - for now or the future. It has helped me to be more confident about the next stage in my life - and that my retirement journey can be an evolving journey with many epic adventures that I will have fun planning. Janet S.
This course has been a wonderful and supportive experience. My knowledge and confidence has grown. I have been able to reflect on all the different dimensions of retirement (so much more than just the finances) and I am genuinely excited to plan and embark on this exciting phase of life. Thank you so much to Bec and the team who have put this together.
Now - enjoy your Sunday. Hope to see you on the course
Bec Xx
Author, podcast host, columnist, retirement educator, and guest speaker
I am the retirement columnist for The Times, UK. You can read my most recent column here or look through all my columns here.
How to overcome the fear that ruins retirements
Foro — the fear of running out of money — affects even those with more than enough savings. Far better to start spending and enjoy a life well lived
Retirement comes with a big problem that we don’t talk about enough. There are people sitting on perfectly good pensions with quite healthy savings and no mortgages who cannot bring themselves to spend their money. They know that the numbers add up and they may even have a financial adviser who has told them they are going to be fine yet still they balk at the idea of spending.
This is called foro — the fear of running out. And it is more widespread, more stubborn and far more costly than most want to admit.
It can mean a life not lived to its fullest: trips not taken, bathrooms and kitchens not renovated, and years of the good stuff put off for the hypothetical “one day” that never seems to arrive. Meanwhile the money sits there doing nothing particularly useful and those who are meant to be enjoying their best years grow older.
The article was published in The Times, on Thursday July 7 and is available for reading here.
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Why do I write a separate newsletter for the UK?
I write a separate newsletter specifically for the UK, because the financial system here is completely different to Australia, where I’m based. Your retirement is shaped by the State Pension, workplace pensions, ISAs and HMRC rules. Not superannuation or the Australian Age Pension.
If I just sent you the Australian version with a few words swapped out, it wouldn’t actually be useful to you. And useful is the whole point.
The big conversations, about when to step back from work, what you want the next chapter to look like, how to make your money last, those are universal. But the practical detail needs to reflect the system you’re actually living in. So that’s what we’ve built here. Tell your friends - we want to help you make your retirement epic - the UK way.
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This is an interesting topic, and something I definitely experienced to some degree. And exploring who you are after retirement can be so much fun!
12 months away from retirement, Bec, and this is a question that keeps popping into my head. But I am still excited for the new chapter ahead and new opportunities to experience.