What questions should you ask yourself to help identify your purpose in retirement? Purpose in retirement isn’t all that different from purpose in life – you just may have more time to pursue it.
Transcript for Episode 2 of the Retirement Readiness Podcast: Finding Purpose in Retirement
Tim Regan: Hi, and welcome to our episode of the Retirement Readiness podcast. I’m Tim Regan, your host for today. And I’ve got with me my co-host, Katie. Katie, tell us a little bit about your time here at PrairieView and why your role is important.
Katie Umland: Sure. So my role is the Head of Marketing. I’m in charge of the client experience here at PrairieView Wealth Partners, and I’ve been here since October of last year.
Tim Regan: Awesome. Well, today, we’re going to talk about what it takes to live a very fruitful or fulfilling retirement. And when we talk about a fulfilling retirement, we talk about living with purpose. And when we think about that, part of the reason, Katie, I hope that you and I have a conversation of this is, as you’ve seen, the voice of our customers, the voice of those that we serve are here to protect family. Hopefully you can help to be their voice in today’s podcast. So let’s talk a little bit about what it takes to live a fulfilled life? Or what does a fulfilled retirement start to look like? And why is it different from when you’re working? So, Katie, if you would, with me, for a little bit, let’s talk about the concept of what we consider our “life box.” And what I’ll do is draw here your life box. And at different points in your life, your box is filled with different things. So give us a little input, Katie, or insight into who you are and what your family is like. What do you do with your life these days? How do you spend your time?
Katie Umland: Sure. So fortunately, or unfortunately, I guess, it depends on how you look at it, I’m pretty far off from retirement. So my box looks a little bit differently now. Right now, I spend a lot of time with my son. He’s only three months old, so a lot of time goes into caring for him. The other time I spend working. So I work here at PrairieView, part-time. So I’m either working in the office or working at home with Dylan. And then I would say the other majority of the time is spent working at home on chores, yard work, keeping up with the house, that kind of thing. And I guess a tiny little space for my husband and I.
Tim Regan: So when you think about your box right now, is there anything that you have that you can really control? Or change? How much of this what we’re going to call “Alex and Katie time,” you get to spend every week? Or are most of the things that fill up your box of life dictated to you or do you or more predetermined?
Katie Umland: I would say pretty predetermined. I have days that I know I have to be in the office. Dylan has needs to have to feed him every three hours. So there’s not a ton of flexibility, I guess, at this point.
Tim Regan: Yeah. It’s crazy during those times, I don’t know how this it is for you, but I remember when we had our kids, it seemed like every time you turned around, it was either diaper change or feeding or something.
Katie Umland: I cannot believe how quickly three hours goes. Like, why is he fussy? Oh, because he needs to eat again.
Tim Regan: Yeah, that’s crazy. Well, and for a lot of our clients, as you know, that feeding and baby time starts to turn into travel soccer or it turns into violin lessons. There’s all kinds of stuff. So when the kids are at home, and they’re younger, we find that a lot of our clients that will pick up their box, if you will, is filled, very similar to how your boxes where you have things that you have to do for your family, you have things that you have to do for work, that you have things that you have to do around the house. And it really doesn’t leave a whole lot of time for you to do things outside of those, which is why the smallest piece is that part at the top for Alex and Katie, because you really don’t have flexibility over how much he thought he had to do to devote to those types of things. So let’s talk a little bit though, about why is it important to have that conversation as you start to enter retirement, and to start thinking about your box. Because what ends up happening is when you get to life in retirement, all of a sudden, your box looks like this again. Nothing in it because all of a sudden you find yourself at a point where the kids have moved out of the house.
Maybe you have grandkids. Work is no longer there. Obviously I don’t think you can get out of doing chores around the house. All of a sudden, you have a bunch of time in your box. And so, as we talk to clients as they start thinking about retirement, the conversation that we start to have is you get to choose now what you put in the box. And so out here, you might have all kinds of stuff. Maybe you’ve got a section that you call, grandkids, maybe there’s a section that you’d call volunteering. Maybe there was a section that you called traveling. Maybe there’s even over here, maybe there’s like a lake home or something like that. And you get to choose now, with this extra time, which of these boxes or which of these things am I going to choose to put in my box? And if clients aren’t intentional about how they do that, they many times put it into retirement, and just, kind of, flip through.
The alarm clock’s not going off at 6am to get up and go to work. They then, all of a sudden, they’re like, “Man, my box is full. But I don’t know what it’s full of because I wasn’t intentional. I wish I was.” And so now that we’re getting close to retirement, it’s the time for people to start filling in the box. And now they can choose, you know, “For this period of time, I’m going to spend this time with my grandkids.” “For this period of time, I’m going to travel.” “Maybe this period of time, I’m going to volunteer.”
And what we find is that many times without the limitations of what they used to have, because if you remember when you were working, all of this three quarters of your box was all dictated for you. You couldn’t choose how you spent that time. Now in retirement, you get to choose that. And so many times what it does is it causes our clients to take pause, and the most successful ones start to reevaluate and say: “What is truly important to me? Because up until this time, I had parameters around what I could fit my box. Today, that’s not the case.”
So our encouragement is that as you start to go through that period of time with that transition, go through some exercises that will help you to determine what could go in your box. You might find that there are things that you didn’t even think were possible, that now are possible because of the time that you have. So Katie, have you ever given any thought to what would life look like if you didn’t have work and kids to take care of and all that kind of stuff?
Katie Umland: I try not to think about it too much, because it’s a little bit of a tease at this point. A little too far off. But yeah, in my dream world, when I do allow myself to think about it, I think about having time to work out. I think about having time to travel with Alex, having time to choose what church services we want to go to. Right now our time is I feel like strapped so we’re limited on, maybe we attend Saturday nights, versus wanting to go on Sunday mornings. I know we want to spend time with our kids as they grow up. We’ve had many conversations about what we want our lives to look like together with them and potentially our grandkids to come. We want to have time, not only to travel, but to do short trips, long trips outside of the US and in the US. So we have we have a lot of plans.
Tim Regan: Yeah. And so it sounds to me, with all those plans, we might have to expand this work portion so you can save. As we talk about that, just a couple of things that we encourage our clients to do. The first one is, when you get ready for that transition, we find that it’s better if you can take some time, and maybe just be thoughtful around what are the things that maybe become possible that you didn’t think were possible.
And a couple of exercises. The first one is, and this one kind of goes in conjunction with each other. So start by taking about 10 minutes. And if you’re new to it and haven’t done it before, don’t let it scare you. But what we say take 10 minutes and meditate. People think that that means a bunch of stuff, but it’s the easiest thing to do. Take your phone out, set a timer on it for 10 minutes, close your eyes, start breathing in through your nose, out through your mouth, counting down from 10. And just do that until the timer goes off. What that does is it starts to free your mind from all this stuff that you had going on, all the running you’re doing, and all that fun stuff. You start with a blank slate.
The second step to that is pick up a notebook. Whether it’s got lines on it, legal pad, whatever works for you, just got a notebook. And then for the next few minutes, just start writing down ask yourself a bunch of questions. Don’t answer any of the questions. What we find is that many times, with our brain, if you ask your brain a question, it will work on trying to solve it. The minute you make a statement, it stops working to try to solve the problem and thinks the solution is there. And so the type of journaling that we do or encourage our clients to do is one where you just ask questions. You can start out by something as simple as:
- What do I think I want to do?
- What I want to spend time with the grandkids?
- If I spend time with the grandkids, what would I do?
- Do I want to travel with the grandkids?
- What would I do with church?
- How could I be a church?
- Would I want to be of service there?
And you just start to unpack that. And as you answer those questions, one question will lead to the next and to the next. And what we find is that many times, by the time our clients get to the end of the page, all of a sudden, they’ve got some clarity around things that they’d like to do, that maybe never even came up with before. If there were things that were already in their mind, many times, they have clarity and more detail around what those things look like, and how they want to go about filling their lives. So we would encourage you to do that.
The second thing is, we would just encourage you to come to a meeting, whether it’s with us or another financial advisor, with an open mind. You know, we have the opportunity from our vantage point to see our clients doing lots of different things. And our ability, if you will, sometimes is to ask those questions and help you to get that sorted out. But what we find is the clients that go through a little bit of prep time before they get through time, end up filling their box with things that are far more significant to them, than if they hadn’t taken the time. So we would encourage you take some time to figure out what you want to put in your box and know that you’ve got time to it’s more of yours. And until we meet again, please feel free to call at any point in time. We’re here to help you live your legacy.
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