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I talked about relationships in early retirement, and how it can be a struggle at first to define your role and function among your friends and family when you are not working a 9 to 5 job any more. Another question I get asked often is how do you fill your days?
When you have a job that takes 40 hours a week, it is hard to imagine that the day you don’t, your days will fill quickly too. Look at my normal day and you’ll see I never get bored.
First, you will spend more time doing the regular things of the day. For example, when I was working, I used to buy something quick to prepare for dinner, sometimes even a frozen meal or a pizza, and if I cooked from scratch, it would rarely take more than 20 minutes to put dinner together, and the leftovers would go in a tupperware to bring lunch to work.
Now, I take my sweet time to cook a proper breakfast, with homemade bread, eggs and beans, the typical Guatemalan side, fresh tomato and garlic sauce, and a natural smoothie. I make pizza, crepes, quiches, tortilla, everything from scratch.
Once a week, I go grocery shopping, and will choose my products carefully, check out prices, plan my meals to avoid food waste, when before I would just order the same thing online again and again and get bored with repetitive meals.
It is a pleasure to do things slowly, and there is simply no point in rushing to do daily chores, as the day has plenty of hours.
Then, you will do all those little things you didn’t have time to do when you were working. Fixing a leak in the bathroom, greasing the door that made noise, or going to your kids’ recital and the HOA meetings. And people will ask for your time too.
When I am in Paris visiting my family, I try to be helpful because there are a lot of things that come easy for me and are a struggle for my mum and sister. Like painting my mum’s living room, ordering a new battery for her laptop on Ebay, fixing her bicycle, … I also happily baby sit my niece that I get to see so rarely. But I refuse to be the errand girl for basic things, I will do their grocery shopping only if I need to go to the store myself. I will post a letter if I have one to send. Otherwise my day would be filled with errands. And the whole point of an early exit was freedom to do what I please with my time.
You have to learn to say no, for example if you carpool kids to school with your neighbors, keep the old schedule, it is not because you don’t have a job anymore that you have to take all the kids to school every single day. I also set my rules if my sister needs a baby sitter, I can do it every day but need to be warned a couple of days ahead. I am also in Paris to meet with my friends and can’t cancel at the last minute because my sister wants to go out with her friends.
Finally, if you fought so hard for years to reach financial independence and enjoy early retirement, you probably had a plan in mind. Some want to travel the world, others spend more time with their kids, or start a pet project, whatever floats your boat. If you are as passionate with your post-retirement project as you were while working and saving hard, then your days will fly by.
Still, people will wonder what you do all day. It is not their problem, really, but I have found that if you are not the norm, people will have a hard time talking to you. For example, when I had a job, people would go on and on about my tasks, responsibilities, my boss, and if I went on holiday they would ask about it for hours too. Now, if I take a 6 months trip to 20 different countries and come back home, they ask “how was your trip?”, I say “great, thanks!” and that is about it, then we move on to talking about their jobs. Hey, a job is what you do to pay the bills, it does not define you. Just because you don’t have a job anymore doesn’t mean you are useless or not worthy of attention. And I don’t think people do it on purpose, they are just at a loss trying to relate to your lifestyle. You can’t understand what you don’t know. So be patient with them, and talk about their job instead.
Oh, and if you get bored in early retirement, you can always get back to work. For your old firm or for your passion, since you don’t need the money anyway, you can work your dream job for free! At the moment my pet projects include three blogs, catering for my hosts now that my house operates as a guest house, overseeing a 90 acre land development, semi active Forex investing (I don’t trade every day, at most once a week). I can assure you that my days are filled. But none of it is an obligation, which is the best part about it.
Have you thought about how you would fill your days in retirement or early retirement? What would you do? Are you afraid of what your relationships would become if you stopped working?
I honestly don’t think too much about early retirement exactly. But I spend a lot of time thinking about building a business that affords the lifestyle I want, which is essentially time to spend with my family as I please. I think the key no matter what your approach is to have a clear vision of where you’re heading. Early retirement itself can’t be the goal. You have to know what you actually DO want to do and then take the steps to get there.
well said Matt, we each have different goals. so there isn’t a one size fits all method to get there.
Filling my time is one thing I do NOT worry about! If I retired early I’d have about 1,000 things I would do that I “never had time for.” Reading, learning new skills, probably starting new businesses (which I realize isn’t exactly “retirement”), travelling…the list goes on.
Look like you have a ton of options!
In the beginning, I would try to travel. I have not done much of it as of late and that irritates me. Other than that, there are too many things that I need to do in order to keep my mind fresh. If I am not doing something, then I go crazy. Early retirement is not something I am looking at.
My grandpa does crosswords, sudokus and reads in English, he is incredibly sharp. The more you train your brain, the more you can do.
I haven’t thought too much about it because it’s so far out for me. I imagine still doing a lot of writing and exercising. I have a feeling I’d never get bored.
There is always something to do, I doubt many people can stay idle for decades.
“But not of it is an obligation, which is the best part about it.” – my favorite sentence. So true! I imagine you do get quite few questions about how you spend your days. And they are full days because I doubt you wanted to retire young to sit around and do nothing. You wanted to do lots of things … on your terms and timeline. And that is the part of retirement I am most looking forward to!
Oops and you just highlighted a typo :). Yes it is pretty cool to do whatever you want, although finding drive and motivation can be a struggle sometimes, when you don’t have to fight for your survival and put food on the table.
I am a productive person by nature so I am sure that I will have packed days even when I am retired. In fact, I really don’t picture myself retiring, per se, but just working less and continuing to do what I love.
That seems like the best way to have a full life. My grandparents do a lot of charity work though, and in their aging region there aren’t any people to take over so it went from volunteering to feeling like they have to stay and do it, like an unpaid job. Hope that doesn’t happen to you.
One of my long-term goals has always been going back to university. Not for any career-related reason but purely because I love the thrill of learning new things. While I hope to start uni part time in the next few years – it’ll be lovely in early retirement to really dive head-first into research that I’m passionate about.
I also have a dark, dirty secret that I’d like to try writing a sitcom, but that’s probably best not admitted to 😉
haha which one do you wish you had written? Me: HIMYM.
I’m really enjoying these posts about the nuances of early retirement, as I wonder what it’ll be like on a day to day basis once we get there. Immensely helpful stuff for your niche of readers!
I would really like to travel and devote more time to learning about the things I’m passionate about, reading and exercising. I think I’ll have a decent amount of hobbies or things I’d like to dabble in to keep me busy. I loved the part about how you take your time when cooking. It would be really nice to have mornings to enjoy a proper breakfast!
Yes I have thought about how to fill my time in retirement. And no, I haven’t ran out of ideas yet.
I’ve never taken a “stay-cation” with my days off but I’m sure I’d never get half the things done I needed to if I did. I know if I retired early and had the money to do so, I’d be plenty busy cooking and cleaning like you say, plus helping out in my community. Even if I had the money, I don’t think I want to retire early but I find it awesome that so many bloggers I read are able to do so!