What’s Your Definition of Retirement – Have You Been Fooled by a False Belief?

When thinking about the definition of retirement, there is something that hits me – right between the eyes. This “impact” helps me gain a new appreciation for what ought to be obvious, or at least common knowledge. I say it hits me right between the eyes because for a long time I had been thinking “inside the box” and allowed myself to believe that a traditional view of retirement was good, when it was really only a firmly held belief. There are many of these Santa Claus type stories out there, and traditional retirement is just one of them.

So, as a self reliant individual, you might care to learn about this myth so you can dispel it through your own initiative. Doing so can help you enjoy life on your terms, instead of the model that many of us are led to believe is the ideal. If you think it’s a pipe dream, then let me highlight my story, and give you two other examples of individuals I know who have done something similar – rejected the idea of working all of their lives and then retiring.

The Problem

From my perspective, it seems that many of us work hard and spend time acquiring things and keeping up with the Joneses, and then we coast into retirement only to find out that we:

• never spent enough time securing our future
• trusted in others to keep their promises
• spent too much time following the examples of others
• bought into the traditional definition of retirement
• failed to have meaningful life-long goals
• lived casually instead of deliberately

Keeping these problem areas in mind, allow me to highlight in a general way what I did. It’s by no means the “right” way to do it, but it worked for me, and should give you an idea of how to do something similarly “outside of the box.”

My Approach

In a nutshell, my approach had me leaving the corporate world (where I made money for others), starting my own enterprise, working hard for many years (for my benefit), saving up money, acquiring meaningful and lasting assets (like my country estate) that would allow me to live debt free without a job, then allowing my business to dwindle down as I spent more time building my estate for self sufficiency. My approach to success focused on the following key areas.

1. Saving money and investing in my future and myself with education, experience, acquisition of durable assets, and a range of financial instruments. Securing my future also included starting my own business so I was in much better control over my time and my ability to earn income.

2. Counting not at all on the Social Security Administration nor any other government program to fund my life. Government sponsored programs might be available and I might make use of them, but I’ve never counted on them. Instead, I count on me.

3. Realizing, like Yogi Berra told us, that there are a lot of things we can see just by looking. I used a similar approach to learn about what worked and what didn’t work when it came to achieving financial freedom. My observations suggested to me that doing what many other people did wasn’t a good pattern to follow – sitting in commuter traffic, holding down a job, hesitant to change employment, punching a time clock, counting down the years and months to retirement, etc.

4. Creating my own definition of retirement was helpful for achieving it early and on my own. The concept was relatively simple – there would be no set end point to my work, but I would have much more choice over what, when, where, how, how much, and the return on investment of my time and energy. This was key to reshaping my expectations and attitude toward success, and that helped me fire up my own enterprise, work hard, and build up meaningful assets that allowed me to self-retire (no government program or company pension) at age 49.

I’ve always had a life-long goal of early retirement, and I’ve been able to achieve that mainly because I knew what I wanted and got myself refocused on that. If you look at people who are low achievers – prisoners, homeless, chronically unemployed and under-employed – you’ll generally find that many of them lack long-term life goals. In other words, they don’t know where they’re going. They live for today and not tomorrow. It’s no wonder their futures aren’t bright.

Your Situation

If you find yourself beginning or perhaps mid-span in your working life, and you’re also concerned about having to count on others to fund your retirement, you might want to re-evaluate what you’re doing and how you want to live out your “golden years.” Many who rely on social security and company pensions are being disappointed to say the least when their expectations of income shift or disappear altogether.

There are many things that you might consider to stack the deck much more in your favor. How about a sideline that provides multiple enterprise-based revenue streams? Is a career change called for? Can you retire early now and start a more secure and promising career? Is teaming with others a viable alternative to going it alone? Or, do you simply stick it out in your current situation and hope for the best?

The choice is yours, and it’s up to you to exercise your choice while you still have the time, interest and ability.

photo credit

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Clair Schwan was ready to retire at age 36, but those plans were stalled by poor decision-making that left him bankrupt at age 41. After getting himself back on the right track, it took only eight years to achieve early self retirement by leaving the corporate world behind and getting out on his own. He isn’t the only example of a non-traditional success story, nor is he the best example. Here are two very different examples of others who have done something that constitutes “out of the box” thinking and action – meet Barbara Winter who has preached living without a job for years, and Mark Zeiger and his family – both are success stories in their own right.

This article was featured in a blog carnival at My Wealth Builder.