How to Step Confidently Into Your Life After Retirement

retired couple sitting in chairs at the beach.

(Image credit: Getty Images)

To understand more about the challenges professionals face as they transition to retirement, Kiplinger spoke with Teresa Amabile, a professor emerita at the Harvard Business School and coauthor of Retiring: Creating a Life That Works for You.

You and your colleagues conducted more than 200 interviews, including multiple interviews over several years, with 14 professionals who were making the transition to retirement. Why did you focus on that demographic?

So much research has shown how health and wealth affect retirement decisions and experiences. We wanted to take those two factors out of the equation and uncover the psychological, social and life-restructuring issues that face people who are financially secure and reasonably healthy. Of course, those factors weren’t completely out of the equation. Nearly everybody said they hoped they and their life partner would stay healthy and fit for many years. And except for maybe one or two C-suite people, nearly everyone worried to some extent about money.

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Why do some older people continue to work past retirement age, even if they can afford to retire comfortably?

Our research uncovered three basic issues. The first is identity. So many of us who are professionals have really invested ourselves in our work, often for decades. We take great pride in what we’ve been able to accomplish, and that’s a big piece of who we are. It’s difficult to think of ourselves in a new way when we see that identity ending.

Second, if you’ve been a really engaged professional, you have developed strong relationships with colleagues, customers and clients who mean a lot to you. Many people find that it’s difficult to retain those relationships after they retire.

The third thing that’s really scary for people is realizing that the life structure of work, which consumed up to 70% of their waking hours for decades, will be gone. Even if you were tired of working, you knew what you were going to be doing every day.

Does phased retirement — working part-time, for example— make it easier for some people to transition to retirement?

Phased retirement can be quite helpful, even if it’s just reducing your work by one day a week. Because it’s a gradual transition, you have time to adjust your sense of self, explore other things and realize there is something on the other side. When one of the 14 people we followed reduced his work week to four days, his daughter asked him to baby-sit her toddler on part of his day off. He agreed to help her out, a bit reluctantly, but was surprised by how it deepened his identity as a grandfather. He loved how the little boy lit up when he saw him. It gave him the sense that there was something waiting for him in retirement and, within a year after retiring, he had built a very satisfying life for himself.

What lessons would you like readers to take from the experiences of the people you interviewed?

The first thing we want people to know is that retiring isn’t just about financial planning. If you want to have a satisfying retirement, it’s not a bad idea to think about retiring as a different kind of work. Allocate some time to deepening relationships that will endure.

You may also want to reactivate an identity from earlier in your life that used to be important to you. One guy I interviewed who had risen to the highest level of his company had been an avid hot-rodder as a teenager. As he was approaching retirement, he started thinking about hot-rodding again, so in the six months before he retired, he got a hot rod — a nicer one this time — and started tinkering with it in his garage. He got reengaged with the hot rod community, which led to a great retirement activity for him and a great set of new relationships.

Note: This item first appeared in Kiplinger Personal Finance Magazine, a monthly, trustworthy source of advice and guidance. Subscribe to help you make more money and keep more of the money you make here.

Block joined Kiplinger in June 2012 from USA Today, where she was a reporter and personal finance columnist for more than 15 years. Prior to that, she worked for the Akron Beacon-Journal and Dow Jones Newswires. In 1993, she was a Knight-Bagehot fellow in economics and business journalism at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. She has a BA in communications from Bethany College in Bethany, W.Va.