5 Questions To Help You Define Enough After Retirement
CHIMAYO, NEW MEXICO - OCTOBER 22, 2018: A tourist pulling a recreational vehicle, or RV, approaches ... More the small town of Chimayo, New Mexico. (Photo by)
One question I've been thinking about lately is this: When is enough, enough? Knowing that you have limited time on this planet, what do you need in order to look back on your life and feel satisfied? Given that we live in a society that worships more, more, more, this can be tricky to answer. It's critical, however, that you define what is enough for you, especially after you're done with your main career and entering full or semi-retirement.
To help get people who attend my workshops thinking, I often ask them about their role models. Who is living a life that looks attractive to you? My husband and I like to observe how others are spending their resources of time, money, and energy. It is not about judging how others are living their lives. It is about looking for ideas and deciding how we want to live the next phase of our life.
For instance, some people strive to buy second homes and then spend time decorating and furnishing these homes. That's their version of enough. For other people, 'enough' might simply be a roof over their head and the ability to go on road trip adventures, and so they downsize and move into an RV. Or they buy an RV so that can travel to places that are hard to get to without having a car.
My husband is a wealth advisor and has followed Warren Buffett's investing philosophy for a long time – and we also admire how Buffet has chosen to live his life. For instance, Buffett has lived in the same home in Omaha that he bought in 1958. 'I'm happy there. I'd move if I thought I'd be happier someplace else,' he explained. For him, that home was enough.
Personally, I find one home a challenge to maintain given other demands and desires for my time. For my husband and I, more than one home would demand money, time, and upkeep that we would rather spend elsewhere. Figuring out what is 'enough' is tied to figuring out our priorities and how we want to spend our resources.
Choosing What You Worship
This topic reminded me of the commencement speech by David Foster Wallace in 2005 at Kenyon College, later published as his book 'This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion about Living a Compassionate Life.' He spoke of the importance of choosing what we 'worship':
… If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you.
On one level, we all know this stuff already. It's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.
Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out.
But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful, it's that they're unconscious. They are default settings.
Life after retirement can be lived on default settings unless we make intentional decisions about how we spend our resources.
What Is Enough To You?
Michael Kay has written extensively about what is enough after retirement. He notes that his conversations with clients always circle back to that particular client's values. His clients often define the financial idea of enough as: 'Enough to not outlive resources, given a particular lifestyle. Enough to provide college for grandchildren. Enough to benefit others through charitable donations.'
Kay talks about how fear keeps us worried about if we have enough. But enough for what? What 'enough money' means to you is obviously very important. But you should think about what you need to live your life with no regrets in other areas as well. See below for five questions to ask yourself in order to assess what enough means for you.
Whether we are still working or not, we still only have 24 hours in a day. Time is our most precious resource. When will we have more time than we have right now? What do we have to give up (or do more of) for us to have enough?
When I interviewed Sahil Bloom, author of 'The Five Types of Wealth: A Transformative Guide to Design Your Dream Life,' for my 'Becoming a Sage' podcast, he said 'Never let the quest for more distract you from the beauty of enough.'
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