A short Friday retirement blog: when I retire what’s my next career?

It’s rare we shop at Waitrose these days. We’re Aldi or Lidl shoppers now. If we end up in Waitrose then we get our free Guardian and also on this occasion, the Waitrose Weekend supplement. So what do we care? I hear you say. Very little, I imagine but I just thought I would mention one thing that cropped up.

On the back of the supplement was an article by Jonathon Agnew (a cricket commentator for those of you not up on these things), entitled ‘Retiring at the right place and the right time is key.’ A headline that caught my attention considering, I often think, that I did neither.

Looking back I think I retired too soon and in the place I had worked for the last 5 or 6 years of my career when perhaps I should have tried one last relocation. Of course not all of us have a choice about the when or the where. We’re simply shown the door with our pension to keep us company if we’re lucky enough to have one.

That aside I was intrigued but, let me say right up front that, as is so often the case with this analogue version of clickbait, the substance of the article itself was disappointing. Neither identifying the right place nor the right time was addressed. No answers here at all. Jonathon wrote that for a sportsperson when and where to retire was ‘one of the toughest decisions for a sportsperson’. And for the rest of us pal, I thought.

If we really did have a mechanism or process for identifying the ‘right time’ and ‘right place’ to retire we’d presumably be a whole lot less angst ridden about what for many of us is an extremely traumatic time. As I say assuming we have a choice in the matter.

Get it wrong he seemed to say and you’re ‘opening the door to unemployment, a loss of self-esteem and identity, addiction or worse’. An increasing number of retirement stories from sportspersons give weight to this idea and with sportspersons you can easily see why this might be the case.

Jonathon told us that retirement had been an easy choice for him, at the relatively early age, for a cricketer, of 30 because he had another career in the media lined up. At 30 it’s probably not surprising that the idea of your ‘next career’ is an appealing even essential one. And also knowing what that ‘career’ is going to be helps a lot.

As I have said repeatedly in these blogs have your next identity lined up. Or let it come to pass if you’re a non-planning kind of person as I know some of you are. But that wasn’t me. I’m Mr Goal setter extraordinaire. Or was until this year.

I actually think that the concept of a ‘new career’* is a useful one for those of us who retire at a more normal age, 65 say. It gives a psychological message that there is a legitimate life beyond retirement. That our retirement will have much of the same meaning as our career. True the money will (hopefully) come from our pension investments rather than being paid a salary but maybe all the other bad things Jonathon identified, as above, won’t be quite so debilitating.

So for me I needed to know what I was going to be doing next. Even though much of what I had planned didn’t happen – no golf, no photography, no long distance travel. And once more I’ll say the idea of having a new identity figured large in my thinking. I know I say this a lot but that’s because I believe it to be ‘true’.

*It might even help those of us who can’t identify what they will actually do with their time when they do retire to idly consider the question – if I were starting a new career in a few month’s time, what would I like it to be? Leave aside any practical considerations, like I need a PHd in X to do that, and let your imagination flow. You might not actually be able to start the career for real but there will almost certainly be some pared down version of it that becomes an option with a pension to take care of the financial side of things.