Surviving The Transition From Full Time Work

The end of April marked the 3rd anniversary of the end of my full-time corporate career - wow that time has really flown by! I’ve been in two minds about whether to publish this post but I’ve been encouraged to do so. 

The following consolidates my personal reflections now that sufficient time has passed for me to have some perspective on being retired (fully or part time), as the word can have some 'terminal' connotations. I've also been contacted by ex-colleagues and friends who are getting ready to do the same at some point and are struggling with the process. Our personal and financial circumstances are bound to be different but, if you find any points here that help you in planning for a more peaceful (though probably not less busy) life, please read on.

My reasons for leaving my corporate job were a confluence of a few circumstances that told me that it was the right time. The death of my father was a big impact, especially coming immediately after the pandemic, the arrival of more Grandchildren (I now have 5), and the realisation that what was most important to me in my life could not be compressed into Saturday and Sunday, my life balance was completely wrong and something had to give.

A visit to my financial advisor, Ian, was the final piece of the jigsaw that told me that I could finally step off the hamster wheel. He said to me "you never need to work another day in your life if you don't want to". Although, as I found out later there were some caveats in this statement, I returned to the car with Debs, my wife, and immediately broke down in tears. My job for the previous 40+ years had been to make me and my family's life financially secure and, according to Ian, I had done my job. Time for a change and I was in control of that decision.

That was 3 years ago, so what have I learnt? Well, I'm still adapting but here are 10 thoughts that I think are worth highlighting. 

1. Get your head around the money side - This is not easy, at least I found it difficult, and I had huge financial anxiety for the first year. Remember, you are no longer getting an income, you are drawing down your life savings. Someone asked me once, how much money do you need to retire, and I had no idea. Although my financial advisor was a huge help in showing me how the cashflow could work during retirement - it was dependent on me knowing how much money I needed to draw down each month and all he could say was 'it’s nowhere near what you think'.  Debs and I agreed that we did not want to lower our standard of living at all, although we had been stupidly wasteful with money up to that point, buying whatever we wanted without really thinking, so that had to change. We sat down with our bank statements and notes, and we worked out how much we thought that we needed to maintain our existing standard of living, breaking down the spends into categories that made sense to us. Each month over the next 6 months we tracked our spend to test our assumptions and guesses and tweaked a big spreadsheet. These 6 months really helped us to overcome our financial paranoia and confirmed that we were in good shape. We have refreshed that spreadsheet each year to change some spend priorities, some investments we wanted to make, holidays we had planned to ensure we can do everything we want to do without scrimping, and we do a quarterly check to make sure that we are not going off the rails. Having a bi-annual review with Ian means we can see the bigger picture with our pensions, ISA's etc and cope with some of the macro impacts to our savings - e.g. I retired just before Russia invaded Ukraine. In conclusion, we live on about 50% of what I earnt monthly, and I have some part time consulting income that we use for funding private healthcare and holidays.

2. Expect some disruption at home - When I was working, I was out of the house at the crack of dawn and home in the evening, so I was absent for most of the week and Debs managed the home and she had a proven routine. Suddenly, I'm home every day and I'm doing more housework to help out (or so I thought), I had some ideas about what to do around the house differently (dangerous!). I had invaded Debs space, and she wasn’t happy. Even though in the leadup to retirement I had been working home a lot, I was shut away in my office out of her way. It took several months and a few heated discussions for us to find a peaceful coexistence. There are adjustments to make with partners at home, whether they work or not, and its best to have this discussion beforehand and air any concerns. I assumed, as usual, that everything would be fine, and I really underestimated the impact on my lovely wife.

3. Do some planning on what you want to do - We got busy very quickly at the beginning, but it was easy to fill time with non-important things, although I cleared a backlog of DIY jobs in the first couple of months. We sat down and worked out holidays, caravan trips, my motorcycle trips, our childcare for our Grandson. We used a wall planner to manage things, but a shared diary does similar. Don’t think that you will have nothing to do, quite the opposite is true and, if you get it, right your time is filled with valuable and enjoyable activities. However, leave space to do absolutely nothing at all, or be spontaneous, without any guilt!

4. Give yourself time to dissipate the brain noise - While working I always had a million things running around in my head, I would wake up in the middle of the night thinking sales forecast and I would be planning my day and all my 'things to do' while I shaved at 5:30am. Once you stop working full time, this 'brain noise' remains and takes quite a while to dissipate. One of my VMware colleagues, who had left a year before, told me that it takes a month for the noise to gradually go. For me it was nearly 3 months before my brain settled down to be replaced by some tranquillity, and it wasn't till that happened that I could fully relax. It was a full mental detox.

5. Don’t try and do everything at once - It’s very tempting, and this was very true for me, to replace a high tempo work life with a high tempo home life and to have a list of 20+ things to do in 30 days - and I even thought of doing a 30/60/90 days plan! This is a big mistake. By all means get all the jobs that have built up over time and clear that backlog, but space other things out leaving plenty of spare time for spontaneity or just chilling out. At the beginning I found that I was feeling guilty for doing nothing, I needed to get over this and enjoy the opportunity to be idle sometimes - though I'm an active person by nature so for me this is always going to be work in progress.

6. Invest in your friendships - None of my long-term friends were in the IT business and they all lived near me, but I worked in the London area and internationally with a significant number of colleagues. While I was working, I did not invest in my friendships and substituted them with work colleagues that I considered friends - any spare time went on the family and I had little time for friends (well I de-prioritised them). The problem is that most work colleagues are exactly that and not really personal friends so, when I stopped work, I became lonely very quickly. Meeting 30-50 people a day either face to face or online instantly became just a couple of people at home and I quickly realised that the face-to-face interaction I had with people was the very best thing about the job that I had. I used to drive 80 miles to the office more often than I need to just to network and socialise and be present in meetings, and this all disappeared pretty much overnight. I've been able to rectify this in the past 4 years, I've really invested in my true friendships and made time for them, I've met some new friends through activities like motorcycling and cycling, and I've realised which ones of my work colleagues were actually real friends and not just 'tactical friends' (I was surprised by some of these).

7. Keep learning and stay connected - Find a few valuable activities that retain some business skills - I love the technology sector; I've never worked anywhere else and it fascinates me. I've loved the process of becoming a sales leader, especially bringing on young talent and building teams. I wanted to retain that interest and use it in a way that I enjoyed and kept me 'current'. I firstly become a governor at the local secondary school and have worked with them on solar power projects, sustainability projects and supported IT strategy development (especially the introduction of AI). I also have been doing some part time consulting which has been a mixture of management consultancy, but I've recently been doing tech podcasts and webinars and some training at colleges and schools. It means I can work when I want to on topics that interest me and with people I really like. I have a good balance of interesting and stimulating work, working with nice people. I have been offered work that would keep me much busier and pay very well, but I have declined it because it breaks my new lifestyle rules. 

8. Look after your health - So many people who retire, particularly from stressful jobs, mysteriously pass away within a couple of years and I don’t have any explanation of this but my theory is not to change routine too drastically too quickly and avoid extremes, put aside time to keep fit in the way that you enjoy (cycling for me), and walk everyday (the dogs help me with that) - and I've kept a better eye on my mental as well as physical health. I also kept up my private health insurance and used it for health assessments and raising concerns early. It is inevitable that during your 60's that some medical issues will occur and I've spent more time at the doctors in the past 12 months than the previous 12 years which, as an active person, is highly frustrating but it’s better to manage your health than crash and burn. I am physically fitter now than I was when working - minimal desk sitting, much less car seat sitting, less bad eating and drinking (and late in the day eating), and much more time for cycling, walking and motorcycling.

9. Be thankful - It is easy to focus on what you miss about work - I miss the people (well most of them), I miss the international travel - both the travel itself and working with people of different nationalities and mindsets, I miss flying over the Canadian frozen wilderness and down the west coast of the US into San Francisco, I miss the adrenaline of a deal. However, I am thankful that during my career I did some amazing things that I didn’t think possible, I met some amazing people, I worked through the best time in tech history, I did impactful things that got reported on BBC News, I was very successful in what I did and worked extremely hard, I helped people with their careers and who still ask me for advice.  I have real friendships that span my apprenticeship at IBM, Cisco, Juniper, VMware and AWS. Most of all, I am still married to Deborah who I met when I was 19 and still an IBM apprentice, and we will celebrate 40 years of marriage this August. We have 3 brilliant grown up kids and 5 crazy funny grandkids - how lucky am I?

10. Make sure you do what you intend - You never know what life throws at you, but I learnt quickly with the death of my father months before I retired and my amazing mother last year, that time waits for no man. If you have ambitions of what you want to do when you retire, make sure you execute on the plan for the most important projects - do not wait and regret not doing it later. Some say you only live once, that’s wrong - you only die once, you live every single day!

Cheers!