© 2020 Michael A. Babiarz
One of the keys to a successful retirement is unearthing all the skills you have accumulated over the many decades of your life. Why? Because you will be using one or more of those skills to create a path towards financial freedom and greater purpose and meaning in this next chapter of your life.
We are told that in retirement, we need to focus on leisure, family, taking time to enjoy the good things of a life lived. And we are also told that for financial support, we are to depend upon our three-legged stool – social security, retirement savings and private savings — to provide the means to do so.
Yet for many, two of the most prevalent fears as a retiree are: (1) “I’m going to run out of money,” and (2) “I don’t feel a sense of satisfaction, meaning or purpose to my everyday life.”
A cure for those fears that is better than alcohol anesthesia and a $10 per hour job at a big box retailer is creating a fourth pillar to add to your three-legged stool. This fourth pillar is a way forward where you make money to supplement your other sources of support and a way that also provides meaning and satisfaction for you as you spend your post-W-2 days.
The fourth pillar could be an entrepreneurial pursuit – maybe consulting, mentoring, teaching, an online business – or a way to use your existing assets more effectively, or both. But to have a strong fourth pillar, a necessary first step is to understand what skills you have to utilize in its creation.
When I was practicing law, I developed a good relationship with the local senior center. One of the employees there became a friend of mine, a friendship that endures to this day. She left the senior center to work as a manager in a local nursing home. Then, she decided she wanted to go back to school and obtain an advanced degree. During the 2 to 3 years she would be enrolled, she wanted to work part-time so that she could have adequate time to focus on her studies. We discussed her situation and I asked her if she wanted to come and work for me. A significant amount of my practice was elder law. I felt that her skills in dealing with seniors, both in the senior center and later in the nursing home, coupled with her undergraduate education, which was in social work, would be invaluable in helping my clients work through some of the collateral, non-legal issues present in their situations.
At first, my friend didn’t see the value in what she could do. When she agreed to come aboard, she remained worried that when she met with clients it would not be billable time for the law firm because, as she put it, “everything I do is really just common sense.”
What this points to is that instead of something being of no value, oftentimes, when we are very skilled at something, it comes easy to us. By seeming to be so easy, we believe it has little value. Yet, the opposite is often true. We are extremely skilled at something and we are offering clients something of incredible value to them.
One of the things that’s a key element in creating a successful fourth pillar is to assess your skills. Almost everyone has something at which they are incredibly good. You may not recognize it because it’s something you do every day and it seems almost second nature. Think about driving a car. When you first learn to drive at age 15 or 16, your head was swimming by how complicated it was to operate this two-ton piece of machinery. Now if you drive to the store you probably don’t even remember the route you took, how you operated the vehicle, or even anything you saw along the way, because your brain can complete this once rather complex and onerous task on an almost subconscious level.
This is the perspective that is required to ascertain your skills. It’s almost like the old visual of peeling a piece of fruit down to its core. There may be lots of layers to go through before you can ascertain your core values and skills. There are lots of assessments that you can take and, with the help of one trained in scoring them, you can obtain guidance towards what it is you’re good at, passionate about, and can offer to others that is of value and service to them.
And with a fourth pillar in place, you can not only have more money with which to support yourself but you will also be engaging in tasks that bring more meaning, pleasure and satisfaction to your life.
Isn’t that what retirement is really supposed to be like?