Photo by Aron Visuals on Unsplash

Over the last decade and a half, researching, planning, and executing our retirement, I have repeatedly bumped into events or information that prove we disregard the single biggest ally we have when creating a life in retirement or working with our retirement finances!  

Benefits

Over and over again, we hurry from thing to thing, trying to solve problem after problem, to get here or there, before this or that happens. It is how we live, think, and react to our lives: this is commonplace.

Yet supposing your personal and financial life came to you with little effort!

• Supposing your stress dropped off every day until getting up every morning was a joy!
• Supposing your income grew annually with little to no effort!
• Supposing your risk was lowered or mitigated increasingly every year!
• Supposing your worry and concern for the future disappeared more and more as you age!
• Supposing you could gain confidence in your ability to weather any financial storm or market situation!
• Supposing when the market dropped, your portfolio fell only half of that drop, yet your income still increased!
• And supposing that drop caused you no worry at all!
• Supposing you spend most of your day looking forward to the next moment and smiling!

How is this possible? By learning to take advantage of a retiree’s, of life’s, of an investor’s biggest ally! The forgotten friend! TIME!

How do you accomplish this?

• By taking control of our future in a manner unavailable and maybe even unthinkable to you before you retire.
• By finding and doing what you have dreamed about or love to do.
• By avoiding the costs associated with “saving and investing” your money.
• By realizing what we are instructed to do repeatedly by employers, bosses, and financial advisors and institutions operate in their favor, not yours.
• By realizing we are constantly asked to sacrifice for someone else, the greatest ally we have – time.

Bosses and jobs always ask for more time and effort, yet salary increases and often personal weekends are hard to come by. Financial institutions want your money yet take no risk, and their fee is guaranteed, constant and consistent. Your returns and risks are neither guaranteed, stable, nor consistent!

A retiree’s biggest ally – TIME

A retiree’s biggest ally is TIME. You may not believe it – after all, we are in the last third of our lives! But we still, on average, have a lump sum of twenty-five years or more to go. And this number increases each year with the advances in medical health and our willingness to get healthy.

Slowing down

I am not quitting on life just because I retired. Are you? Yet over and over, I read about retirees trying to cram more to-does into less time. They forget that slowing down increases (less stress) the time they do have.

I repeatedly read the commands to buy this investment and sell that investment. The holding period for stocks has dropped from eight years in the ‘50s to 6 years in the ‘70s and five and a half months today! Five and a half months is not much time, and less time creates greater risk!

Slowing down is easy. It only takes the decision to lead a life designed around moments rather than tasks. Taking a walk without a cell phone works for some and for others it is journaling or meditation. For me it is walking, working out and meditation.

Did you know:

• Less stress equals longer life!
• Longer holding periods for stocks earns you more money not less, and will increase the cushion you have offsetting the risks you take!
• There are stocks that have paid and increased their dividend to you every year for the last 50+ years!
• Did you know it takes more effort to get healthy than to stay healthy? But the value of getting healthly is more years of life!
• Did you know that most of us pay as much or more in fees to financial institutions than we save! Yet we are told continually by the same institutions that we don’t save enough? We worry about life and finances without realizing we can eliminate those worries and make retirement the best time of our lives!

In retirement, slowing down, allowing time to exist in moments can be the springboard to happiness simply changing focus and getting simple. People complicate life; life is not, by necessity, complicated.

How do you slow down? By learning new skills and by deciding how we live has a tremendous effect on how long and how well we live. By realizing that time and effort can always make things brighter and better. By creating a more stress-free life taking charge of who we are and what we have.

How do you do that?

First, find what you love to do and do it.  

Next, figure out who your best self is and create you again. Based on allowing time to complete your life rather than trying to cram in more things to do.

Third, by realizing that simplicity in all things is a greater force for a better life than complicated: by learning that no one, anywhere at any time, will take care of us as well as we can take care of ourselves.

It all fits together: who we are, (our best selves), what we love doing (that is why we are here), how we take care of the body that is given us (without our health, everything is more difficult), and by getting simple: in finances, in health, in what we do, and in who we are!

Finally, by understanding that regardless of how much “time we have left,” how we use the time we have is all-important. Time is always our ally; whether we have 24 hours or 24 years, what we do in our time is all that matters!

A friend who changed her life

I had a friend and client come to my office one day in tears. Her doctor had just told her 25 minutes before, that she had three to six months to live. She said she needed more time to make sure her daughters were ok. She had rare cancer from which no one had ever lived beyond six months, chemo or no chemo.

Now, this lady had three jobs: a real estate agent, a person who managed houses with a separate business, and she owned a store that sold high-end second-hand women’s clothing. She was on and going seven days a week. But now, she said, her focus was her daughters. She wanted to see them graduate college, find good jobs, own their own homes, and marry. That was not going to happen in three to six months.

Her chemo, experimental as it was, began the next day, so we started laying out a plan.

          A new focus

The principal focus was her attitude, stress level, and her daughters. So here is what we initially created for her future:

1. Sell all her businesses ASAP (this took about five months)
2. Spend more time with her daughters
3. Learn to meditate
4. Take regular walks, without the cell phone
5. Turn off the sound on her cell phone at 5 PM
6. Focus on all the good things in her life
7. Allow herself to think only positive thoughts

Over the next few months, she began to accomplish what she had set out to do. I taught her the basics of meditation, and the businesses sold one by one. But one thing stood like an impenetrable wall in front of her. She was the person all her friends called to complain about their lives. She was compassionate and enabling to a fault. 

We discussed her primary focus, her daughters. We examined the effects negativity had on her life. Were her friends, many of whom she had known since high school, of greater importance than her children, her life, and her goals?

She made a deal with herself and told all her friends about the decision. She would no longer listen to any negative talk about their lives or anyone! If they couldn’t be positive, she couldn’t talk, if it happened more than once, no friendship.  

I had run out of things to teach her about meditation; I am hardly an expert. But life has a way of opening doors for us, and a week later, her daughter picked up an itinerant swami, hitchhiking across the nation. She had her teachers in place: a swami and her priest. She had me to talk with and plan.

As her friends dropped off one by one, she experienced more and more peace: longer walks, more profound meditation, and six months became a year. She wound up with six true friends who agreed to her terms.

          What happened!

My dear friend lived almost six years and endured over 220 chemo treatments. (The average chemo patient has about 16 treatments.)

The most amazing thing to me was that she became a happier person and that her physical body showed none of the ravages of chemo until she stopped treatment five years after she started. She looked healthier at the end of her treatment than at the beginning. Impossible as that sounds, it was true. Her body finally quit, eight months after ending chemo. Only after stopping chemo did her visage change.

          Her goals?

She met every one of them: to the astonishment of her doctors, her friends, her family, and everyone who knew her, myself included.

Her daughters graduated college and got good jobs. They both married, and she made sure they got a home. What she did was to slow down, increase her quality of life, and quite literally bend or increase time by living a better more centered life in the midst of the physical pain and problems she was enduring.

If she can do that prompted by a disease, why cannot we do the same by focusing on the things we want to most? By creating the life we have always wanted in retirement? 

What about us?

Is what my friend did extraordinary? In beating the odds, definitely, but mostly in how she changed her life!  We can all do amazing things when our backs are up against a wall.

But we can do amazing things every day! Read “The Last Lecture” by Randy Pausch or look up the story of Claire Wineland – she too was exceptional.

Do we have to get cancer or cystic fibrosis to make excellent use of our time? I think not!

In each case, these people used time as their ally, not their enemy. They slowed way down, and they focused on things they loved doing. They made what was important to them important enough to use time as an ally. To make time work for them and their needs.

I try each day to have time work for me: meditation, writing, investing, and teaching investing and retirement. I strive to keep positive thoughts, focus on the present and believe in the future and my part in it. Am I very good at it yet? Not always! I have a long way to go. But then time is my ally, isn’t it!

About the author:

Over the last five years, Chip Stites, his wife Shonna, and their dog Frankie have lived in Italy. Mr. Stites writes and speaks for International Living Magazine and other publications like THE ZONE.

He has created TheLaughingRetirement.com® and The Laughing Retirement Community on Facebook. He teaches simple investing methods for retirees that eliminate fees, lower risk, and create a growing annual income that does not “drawdown” a retiree’s nest egg. He and anyone else can do all this without using financial products.

He and his wife Shonna can be reached at info@thelaugingretirement.com or by messaging them on FB.