But I do worry about being self-motivated enough to do any of these things. Right now, despite my good intentions, when I get free time, I am most likely to collapse into a puddle on the floor and only get up when I have to. I am a bit concerned that I will just while away the time if there is no external accountability. But then again, who cares, right? There's no law that says I have to be productive, as long as I can live off the spoils of having been productive. That said, I'm not sure I would be happy unless I'm doing something, and if that's the case, it's not hard to go get external accountability (get a job, join a board, etc.).
This. I'm inherently lazy, and I'm afraid that without somebody hounding me I'll just sit on my laptop all day. I'm surprised more people don't worry about this.
Is that just because I'm working and therefore always tired and need to rest? Perhaps..... but what if it's just because I'm lazy? The possibilities of all that freedom are mind-blowing so I hope I can be bothered actually taking advantage of them! I'm scared of this aspect of things.
It's difficult to reassure people on this issue.
I use a couple of metaphors. One of them is the "fog of work" (a military play on words) that keeps you from getting up off the couch to change your life. (
http://the-military-guide.com/2011/01/06/the-fog-of-work/) Chronic fatigue (and willpower erosion) is real and debilitating. When I retired I slept hard, long, and often for at least a month before my fog of work began to lift.
Another metaphor is childhood. When school let out for the summer, you had two choices. If you sat around and whined about how bored you were, your parents found some horrible chore for you. As an adult with your own responsibilities, the same is still true: if you're bored there's always yardwork and home maintenance. But the reality of childhood was that the summer raced by faster than you'd believe possible. Every day was full of plans, you went full-bore from before dawn to after sunset, you were in the flow, and you still had things left undone. You were perfectly capable of entertaining yourself as a kid, and as an adult you'll still be able to do so.
I have a copy of Ernie Zelinski's "Get-A-Life Tree" mindmap sitting on my desk. (
http://bestretirementquotes.blogspot.com/2009/10/get-life-tree-great-retirement-planning.html) It's sat there for over a decade, and it's still blank. I've been too busy to get around to figuring out what I could be doing all day.
In the 1990s, Intel's sabbatical program became available to a number of their more senior workers. Most of them took off several months, and a few were gone for nearly a year. It completely ruined them for work-- when they returned, they discovered that they'd been suffering from the "boiled frog" syndrome and no longer had any patience for a toxic corporate environment. But aside from that, they learned that retirement was a great gig because they got to practice it for a few months while being secure in the knowledge that they could always go back to work. It's possible to duplicate that at home with a long vacation (at least several weeks) or unpaid leave.
Don't get me wrong: most people won't retire and immediately start working on your Great American Project. You'll play a lot of Windows Solitaire or video games, and you'll read a lot of websites or catch up on the latest TV pop culture. But after a few weeks of that, your brain will kickstart and you'll be living your retirement dreams. You can cut down on the "mindless recovery" phase by forcing yourself to walk a few miles a day or some other form of daily exercise, or you can jump into volunteering if you've found something that really interests you. But it's perfectly fine to enjoy a few months of aimless idleness. When you sleep for 12 hours and can't get out of bed until after lunch then you may have a problem, but otherwise everything's going to work out fine.
The short answer is that everyone worries about being responsible for their own entertainment in retirement. After they retired, though, they wondered what the heck they were worrying about.
Not too worried about #1. Even if I retired today at age 45 and live to 95, I still won't get everything done that I want to.
I am worried about #2. Maybe not in a year like 2013 where the market is up so much that I wouldn't even notice my withdrawals. My concern would be in a year like 2008 where the S&P 500 crashed 40%. I know intellectually that the answers to that are:
- stay the course - don't panic
- diversify
- earn a side income
- reduce spending
But right now I see a market correction/crash as a great buying opportunity. After retirement I am not sure how stressed I would get about it.
I'm not sure whether the stress is age-related or retirement-related. After 1987's Black Monday we put everything we could into the markets for an entire year, and I remember feeling like a kid in a candy store. We got through 2001-2002 with some pretty stressful discussions about our portfolio, and I retired in June 2002 only to watch things get even worse (the bottom was Oct). But of course 2003-2007 made up for all of that angst.
2008-09 was vicious because it was so unexpected, but also because we'd been been through this before. We were frustrated that we apparently hadn't learned from experience and were still caught by surprise. In retrospect, however, we did all the right things. We put our 16-year-old's college fund 100% into CDs, we did a lot of tax-loss swapping on the way down, and we jumped in with extra funds in early 2009 (a couple tense months before the bottom). We even spent extra money on home improvement because contractors were really cheap and eager to work. But despite three decades of investing experience, we quickly tired of the uncertainty and doom/gloom. We knew that we had "enough", but we just wanted to feel more comfortable about spending money.
The answer seems to be to have a little more cash in the portfolio... instead of two years' expenses in CDs, feel comfortable with easing up to three whenever the stock market hits a new high. Then you can either sit on it or treat it as "dry powder".
For those who would've been upset by Black Monday (let alone the tech wreck or the financial crisis) the answer is to diversify away from stocks into annuities, real estate funds, rental properties, dividend equities, long-term CDs, and other streams of income that don't depend on realizing capital gains.
