In the article - 8,000 Days Of Retirement: An Entire Phase Of Your Life Waiting To Be Invented, author Coughlin suggests that the best way to think about retirement is as the fourth of a series of 8,000-day life segments.
- The first 8,000 days – which is about 22 years – takes us from birth to adulthood, when we graduate college and become (hopefully!) productive adults.
- The second 8,000 days takes us from college graduation to ‘midlife’ (age 44),
- The next 8,000 days takes us from midlife to ‘retirement’ (at age 66).
- And prompts the question: what do you want to do with those next/last 8,000 days?
The significance of framing this way – as 8,000 days – is that it’s a lot of days, and helps to emphasize to prospective retirees how much time they’ll really have… and how bored they may get without either a plan or at least a readiness for retirement itself to grow and evolve. After all, ‘play more golf’ may sound appealing as a retirement plan… but probably not if it’s going to be 8,000 days of golf! In fact, 8,000 days can actually be such a big retirement phase to tackle, that Coughlin suggests breaking it down further into four sub-phases:
- the Honeymoon phase (what you do with the early active years of retirement, which might include more travel, more volunteer work, or even more ‘work’, as the labor force participation rate of those aged 65-74 is projected to hit 30% by 2026);
- the Big Decision phase, as we transition into our 70s, when work really begins to fade from view, health may be less vibrant, but there’s an opportunity to make or renew social connections (e.g., grandparenting, volunteering, social hobbies), and the big question becomes, “Where will we live, and where will we go every day?”;
- the Navigating Complexity phase, when health, unfortunately, deteriorates further, and health management itself can become a more full-time job with additional doctor’s appointments, medication management, and rising mobility challenges; and
- the Solo journey phase, which sadly may entail the death of a spouse, or a fall or stroke that brings about a sudden and drastic change in needs and lifestyle… and thus requires making more of a plan about where Helping Hands (family, hired care, or otherwise) may come from.
Of course, not everyone will navigate the stages in the same manner and timeline, and some of them have sad challenges associated that may be tough to think about… yet ultimately, isn’t preparing for such situations what financial planning is really all about?