Retirement Planning at the Oscars

It’s awards season, and while I love movies, I mostly watch the awards shows for the Red Carpet. But each year I make a point to see the Oscar-nominated short films in the brief window when they are shown in theatres. This year, one of them was about retirement planning. Imagine my surprise. (Seriously, what was this filmmaker thinking?)

ONE MAN’S PLAN
This animated short film deals less with the financial means to make your retirement dreams happen, and more about the ephemeral nature of time. What do we dream about doing once we have more time? Are we holding off doing things we want (or need) to do? Are we saving it all up for the end?

You can watch one man’s choices while he dreams about his time in retirement in Retirement Plan here, courtesy of The New Yorker magazine.

The animation is spare, and in a mere seven minutes we pass through decades. What I loved about this film was the range of our retired guy, Roy: he has a long list of potential “to-do’s” for his retirement plan. He does a lot of things he thinks he should do, tries some things he thinks he should try, some things he never needs to try again, and finds some things that surprise him. Ultimately he’s making up his mind about what’s valuable to him, about how best to spend his time.

HOW WE SPEND OUR TIME
We talk about time like we talk about money: we spend it, we save it, we waste it. But it’s not like money: you might have a fixed income in retirement, but time really IS fixed. Today is all any of us have.

So what are you doing with it?

How you spend your time tells you what is important to you. Most of us have to work to live. We need to sleep (though you’re probably not getting all of this that you should). So, work eight hours, sleep eight hours. What happens with the other eight?

WORK TIME
When we think about time, we often divide our lives into two big periods: Work and Retirement. And the brass ring that is retirement in the traditional sense is the freedom to do what you want with your time. No one is clocking your hours or scheduling your life.

We make a mistake when we divide our time up this way. But our modern economy is built on an outdated factory system, and you are a cog that needs to work at certain times, doing certain things.

But you are not a cog.

So when you look at retirement, there can be the real release of time, of being able to choose what you do and when. Traditional retirement means getting off the bus, leaving behind that social network, the structure of your day, often your identity. But there are two parts of the retirement puzzle that need to be solved: You may know what you are retiring FROM, but you may not have figured out yet what you are retiring TO. What does the structure of your day, your social life, your identity look like in retirement?

Our animated man Roy puzzles this out as we watch. Mitch Anthony calls this a new “retirementality“: a way to repurpose who you are to focus on what matters beyond making the almighty dollar. It’s new thinking to match an era of increased longevity. When you retire at 60 and can potentially live another four decades, even if you are dreaming of retirement on a golf course, that is A LOT of golf. For others, this freedom offers time to lean into something new: maybe a new job, or our old job in a new way, or an expanded engagement for a cause, or application of our talents to a long-time avocation.

Take a deep breath, because if you’re still working, it’s more than likely you’ll be planning for a 100-year life. (And the older you are now, the more likely you’ll reach 100.) That might freak you out, but think about what it would mean for how you’re spending your time TODAY if you didn’t have to cram everything you’re doing now into the time you have until you reach 60 or 65. It changes the retirement planning math to work less now, but for a longer period. It changes life today to be able to indulge your talents in ways that lift your spirit, to enjoy leisure not just in retirement, but along the way.

LIFE AFTER WORK
Until we can rework the workday, retired life can give us a chance to restructure our time. Once you leave the controlled time of the workplace, like Roy, you *might* want to answer all of the emails you’ve flagged in your Inbox. You *might* want to read the 35 years’ worth of saved articles on your reading list. You *might* want to organize your closet or try new things. All fine ideas.

But what really matters to you? How will you budget your time? And what if you have too much time on your hands? What happens when there is nothing else to do?

THE TIME BUDGET
It really is one of the most reviled words in financial planning: BUDGET. It sounds like a constraint. Which it is. Constraints force you to make choices. Money – believe it or not – is a little more fluid: You can find ways to make more money. Time offers the ultimate constraint, a strict budget.

If you want to delve into yours, try this:
Over the next few weeks, track how you are spending your time. Use a time tracking app, a note taker, or go Old School and use a little notebook. Everything goes in this: the time on social media, the time stuck in traffic, the time doomscrolling. It’s only for a few weeks. Then have a look: What are you spending your time on?

This is less about squeezing out every drop efficiency from your day. It’s about spending the scarce free hours you have intentionally.

What are you putting off? What are you “saving” for a rainy day? Are you sure you want to? Are you sure you can afford to put those things off?

Working your time budget can make life better now, and give you a different runway into your future. We can’t control everything about our time, but a nudge for some flexibility here, adding back something you really enjoy there, outsourcing some of what you really don’t do efficiently (i.e. housecleaning, your taxes), can “make” more time in your life today. And it may mean you’re not looking at 35,000 emails when you first step off the work bus into retired life.