What are you waiting for? Permission? Extra time? Enough money?
What’s holding you back? Fear? Laziness? Uncertainty?
I’ve struggled with all of those things at one time or another. In fact, I’m struggling with most of them right now as we get ready to head out on our first mini-retirement (update on that next week).
But here’s the thing. The time will never be “right.” The conditions will never be “perfect.” The things holding us back will never magically align and start flashing a giant green light.
The road less traveled will never be safe, risk free or totally clear. Sometimes you just need to go. To try. To step out and take a chance. If you don’t, that chance will vanish. “To wait” has a funny way of becoming “too late.”
When that happens, you’ll no longer have something trivial like money or fear holding you back. It will be something much harder to overcome, like your health or some other door that was once wide open only to slam shut.
So don’t wait. Your life and opportunities won’t go on forever. Someday it will be “too late.” That realization should cause you to live with a sense of urgency and to focus on the people, issues and goals that are important to you. Time will rush on. What will you do to make the most of it? What will you do to live a meaningful life and leave the world a better place?
“We are now faced with the fact, my friends, that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history, there is such a thing as being too late. Procrastination is still the thief of time. Life often leaves us standing bare, naked, and dejected with a lost opportunity. The tide in the affairs of men does not remain at flood—it ebbs. We may cry out desperately for time to pause in her passage, but time is adamant to every plea and rushes on. Over the bleached bones and jumbled residues of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words, “Too late.” ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.
“The hardest thing in the world is to simplify your life. It’s so easy to make it complex.”
~ Yvon Chouinard, Founder of Patagonia
Minimalism and a Meaningful Retirement
I recently sat down for a conversation with Joshua Becker of Becoming Minimalist to discuss how we can simplify our lives in order to better focus on what’s important. What prompted the conversation?
I have often joked that my life resembles a Rube Goldberg machine. It gets results—food on the table, work done, semi-regular exercise, etc.—but often only after a complex and convoluted series of steps.
As you can imagine, this sometimes creates no small amount of cognitive dissonance as I try to hold the contradictory ideas of living an intentional, meaningful life while constantly struggling with busyness and complication.
I’m guessing some of you are dealing with the same problem. I don’t want retirement (or life in general) to look like the equivalent of a cluttered junk drawer, so I reached out to Joshua to get his thoughts on how minimalism can help deal with the problem. He defines minimalism like this:
“Minimalism is the promotion of things I most value and the removal of everything that distracts me from it.”
So it’s not necessarily about how many shirts you have or how big your house is. It’s about defining what’s important to you and what isn’t. Then you ruthlessly cut the latter in order to create space, time and money for the former. It’s about becoming a minimalist in the things that don’t matter so you can become a maximalist in the things that do.
What are some practical ways to do that? What are the benefits? How can we simplify life, minimize stress, and focus on what we really want out of life? Answers to those questions and more are in my interview with Joshua. You can either listen to it using the player below or, if you’d prefer, I’ve attached a PDF transcript as well. [Note: If you’re reading this in an email, you may need to view the post online in order to use the media player.]
After listening, spend a few minutes thinking about ways to clear the clutter from key areas of your own life. Your possessions are an obvious place to start, but don’t forget things like your work, relationships, obligations, finances and goals.
I’ll write more about how to simplify life in retirement in future posts, but until then, you may want to check out these articles on Joshua’s blog…
One last note. We were updating our web hosting last week and a glitch caused an email titled “Hello World” to be sent unintentionally. I apologize for the annoyance.
It’s no accident that this site is called Intentional Retirement.
Being intentional with this brief, but beautiful life is one of the things I’ve tried to weave into the DNA of the site since day one. I preach that sermon every chance I get and I work hard to practice what I preach. I know many of you do the same.
One side effect of being intentional is that you start to tackle big things. You look past the low hanging fruit of your daily “To Do List” and instead set your sights on those big, intimidating goals that you’ve thought about for years, but have never brought to the front burner of life.
Here’s an example from my own life. As many of you know, I’m in the middle of planning my first Mini-Retirement. One thing I’ve learned so far is that ditching your job and traveling halfway around the world for four weeks takes a lot of planning. I know. Who knew? Right?
I’ve spent months working on logistics like accommodations, rental cars, airfare, event tickets, reservations, train tickets and daily itineraries. This is to say nothing of other important details like figuring out a way to pay for it all (Donations accepted. Just kidding. I’ve learned a lot about traveling less expensively and I’ll detail that in a future post.).
As I thought about all this, I had a flash of insight relating to doing big things. It’s the universal secret to accomplishing anything big in life, whether that’s a big trip, writing a book, having a great relationship, building a healthy marriage, having a successful career, getting in shape or putting a man on the moon.
Here it is.
Ready?
The secret to doing big things is to do a bunch of little things. In other words, you don’t “write a book,” you write a little bit today, and then tomorrow and then the next day. You do that a few thousand times and then throw in a good dose of editing, pitching and publishing and Voila! You’ve written a book. This same process applies to anything big you want to do in life.
If I were to put that into an equation, it would look something like this:
Little things + Consistency + Time = Big Things
Application
As you think about how you can apply the above equation in your own life, keep one thing in mind: The clock is ticking. In other words, the “Time” variable in the equation is getting smaller each day. Why is that important? Because if “Time” is getting smaller, then you need to increase the “Little Things” and the “Consistency” in order to still achieve the “Big Things” that you have in mind. If you can’t do that, then you need to rewrite your equation to get rid of the “Big Things” and replace them with medium or small things.
That’s why I’m so adamant about not waiting until your 60s to retire. It’s why I’m so against saving the best for last. Too many people follow the “traditional retirement” path and when they arrive, they realize that their equation doesn’t balance. They do the mental math and realize that many of their plans and dreams require a crazy amount of effort and consistency because they’ve waited so long start. This results in no small amount of discouragement as they let those dreams go and settle on smaller plans.
So remember that equation above. Dream big, but don’t wait to start. Retire today.
As many of you know, I took a bit of a risk recently and committed to taking a mini-retirement sometime before the end of next year. I say “risk” because I hadn’t talked to either my wife or my boss before I wrote this post, but sometimes ready, fire, aim is the best approach.
Since then, we’ve spent many nights at the dinner table discussing the how, where and when (and if!) of mini-retirement numero uno. Early on, those discussions revolved around convincing my wife why a month in a foreign land was a higher priority than that kitchen remodel that she’s been wanting. She loves to travel as much as I do, however, so the discussion quickly shifted to “where are we going?”
For this first adventure, she thought it would be a good idea to go somewhere English speaking. Language hasn’t been a huge barrier on previous trips (although China was a bit of a challenge), but since we’re going for a month and we’re taking our daughter with us, minimizing potential stressors seemed like a good idea.
After throwing out a variety of options, we quickly settled on Ireland and England. I’ve always wanted to visit the land of Guinness and my wife has always wanted to visit an area of England called the Cotswolds.
The Planning Process
Step 1 was doing some research. We stopped by the bookstore and picked up travel guides for both countries as well as Lonely Planet City Guides for Dublin and London. We started going through the guides and listing out things we wanted to see and do in each place. That gave us a good idea of what our trip itinerary would look like, so we started looking for places to stay in each destination.
I’m not a huge fan of staying in hotels on longer trips. Not only are they expensive, but they don’t give you much of a local flavor for where you’re visiting. If we’re staying for more than a few days, I prefer to rent a small house or apartment. There are only three of us in my family, so it doesn’t need to be anything large or extravagant.
I typically use a site called Vacation Rental by Owner, but for this trip I also used a site called Airbnb as well as a company that specializes in renting cottages in the Cotswolds. So far we’ve booked a small cottage in the Cotswolds for two weeks, a cool old barn that’s been converted into a house in Ireland, and a hotel in Western Ireland because we’ll only be there a few days. No turning back now! We still need to get places in London and Dublin, but because those are large cities, there are plenty of options.
I haven’t booked the airfare yet, but I’ve been using the Kayak App to track two different options. Option 1 is buying an open-jaw ticket that goes from Omaha, to Dublin, to London, to Omaha. An open-jaw ticket is where you leave from a different city than you originally arrived. Option 2 is to just buy a round trip ticket to Ireland and then either use our British Airways points or low cost carrier Ryanair to book a round trip between Dublin and London. I’m leaning toward Option 2 because it’s about $500 cheaper per ticket, which translates to $1,500 for the three of us. I’ll probably pull the trigger on that soon.
We’ll need a car for part of the time in each country, so I reserved (and prepaid because it’s cheaper) for those as well. I typically use Avis. They have a program called Avis Preferred that costs nothing, but saves a huge amount of time and hassle. If you sign up, it allows you to bypass the rental counter (i.e. Dante’s 5th circle of hell) and go directly to your car.
What I’ve Learned
So that’s where we’re at so far. Here are a few takeaways from the process:
1) I was reminded again about the importance of deciding. Big goals can be challenging, scary, complicated and overwhelming. Because of that, it’s often tough to get started. Once you commit to do something however, the tough part is over. The rest is just logistics.
2) Planning early has allowed us to digest the expenses over time. I’ve mentioned before that we are by no means a wealthy family. We live on a single income and have what I have referred to before as an extravagantly modest lifestyle. We spend on key things that are important to us (e.g. travel), but keep a tight rein on the rest of the budget. Starting this process early has allowed us to pay for things like housing, transportation and plane tickets as we go rather than buying all those things at once and then facing a huge credit card bill.
3) There are some amazing tools available to travelers. I mentioned some of the sites I use for booking as well as travel apps that I’m fond of, but that’s just scratching the surface. Researching and planning a trip has never been easier.
4) I have some great readers! I’ve heard from quite a few of you who are putting the mini-retirement concept into practice in your own lives. Keep at it and let me know if there’s ever anything I can do to help.
How about you? Is there something you’ve always wanted to do? Don’t save the best for last. Get started now. Feel free to share your plans in the comments section and we can be cheering you on.
I hope you’re warm wherever you are. It’s a beautiful negative 3 degrees in Omaha this morning. If I hadn’t already committed all of my vacation time in 2014 to this other trip, I’d be researching an island getaway right now. Have a great weekend!
Life is busy. One day runs into the next and then the next, a constant blur of busyness, work, errands and seemingly important (at the time at least) comings and goings. If you’re not careful, you look up one day and wonder where the last 20 years went. That’s why I spend so much time talking about being intentional. No on cares more about your life than you. If you aren’t focused on wringing the most from your days, it’s a safe bet that no one will be.
We know this, of course, but sometimes it’s good to have a reminder. It’s good to have someone come along and whisper “carpe diem” or “nothing gold can stay.” So when I came across a thought provoking video recently that breaks down our days and how we’ll spend them, I wanted to share it with you. Just click the link below for the short youtube video.
Long-suffering readers know that I have a bit of a different take on retirement than most. Where others see something based on age or assets, I see something based on control. Where others see a life-stage, I see a lifestyle philosophy.
After all, why should living the life you truly want to live depend on how many birthdays you’ve had or whether or not you punch a time clock? How in the world has it become acceptable to defer your dreams and push the best things in life to the very end?
The concept sounds great, of course, but how do you do it? I’ve offered some ideas before (for example, here, here and here), but I’d like to expand on an additional idea that I’ve only briefly mentioned in the past: Mini-Retirements. What exactly is a mini-retirement?
With traditional retirement, you save up the good stuff for that 20-30 year period at the end of life.
The idea of mini-retirements takes some of that 20-30 year period (say 5 years), breaks it up into 1-3 month chunks and spreads it out over your working years. A mini-retirement is longer than a vacation, but shorter than…well…retirement.
As you might imagine, there are a number of benefits to taking these extended periods off:
You have time to actually experience a place rather than just visiting the touristy spots.
It allows you to enjoy some of the benefits of retirement while you’re still young and healthy.
It rejuvenates you and can help you come back to work more engaged and more productive.
I didn’t invent the idea of mini-retirements (I was introduced to it by Tim Ferriss), but the concept fits perfectly with my philosophy here at Intentional Retirement. Namely that retirement shouldn’t be something that is delayed until “Someday,” but rather it should be an incremental process that is incorporated into your life now.
My mini-retirement experiment
Renting an apartment in Madrid or Melbourne and immersing yourself in the culture for a few months sounds great, but there are a number of challenges. For example:
How do you pay for it?
How can you get the time off work?
Where should you go?
What about your spouse and/or kids?
What do you do with your house when you leave?
What type of planning is involved (e.g. housing, airfare, language barrier)?
To answer those questions, I plan on researching and writing a series of posts and then scheduling a mini-retirement for myself by the end of next year (You may have noticed a few of them on my 50-by-50 List). As some of you know, I’m working, married and have an 8-year-old daughter, so this will be no small task. I don’t yet know where, when or how, but I know why and as faithful readers know, why is half the battle.
So follow along and let’s figure it out together. I’d love it if some of you were inspired to do something similar. Feel free to email me questions or leave comments in the articles about your own thoughts and planning. It’s always easier to tackle big goals when you have company.
Hope to see you on the road.
~ Joe
P.S. Have you read the IR Manifesto A Brief Guide to Retirement Bliss? If not, you can download a free copy over here.
Photo courtesy of Mihhailov. Used under Creative Commons License.
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