When Anna had her first baby, she had every intention of returning to her corporate job after maternity leave. But when her company changed its flexible working policy from some to none – meaning a four-hour daily commute to and from London – she felt she had no choice but to quit.
“When you've made a choice because your priorities have shifted so seismically with the arrival of this little person, you start to question everything about your working life,” says Anna, 37. “I felt I should be applying for similar roles because I needed to make the same money, and wanted to retain a sense of professional status. But the job specs depressed me. Those similar to my old job required much of the same unimaginative presenteeism. Those boasting fully remote set-ups were written by start-ups who expected unhinged levels of devotion.”
Anna began to think about what she truly wanted from her day-to-day life. “The answer wasn't constant deadlines, long commutes, or office politics. I wanted to work for myself and to be creative. So I'm finishing up a non-fiction book proposal and hoping to pitch it to editors in the autumn.”
When asked how she’s creating support for herself, Anna draws it back to personal relationships and like-minded people. She has a group of new mums and friends in her neighbourhood whose schedules are far from the 9-5 norm.
“My husband is also very supportive,” she adds. “Having worked for himself for a long time, he's more gung-ho about living a less conventional existence, both from a creative and financial perspective, so his cheerleading has been invaluable. I did a virtual writing course at the beginning of my mat leave too, and a few people I met there have been great to check in with and send work to.”
What if you could retire over and over and over again?
The world ‘retirement’ is not as one-dimensional as it once was. Dr. Susan Reid, a recently retired professor, businesswoman and author of Re-Visioning Retirement, sees retiring as more than a financial event, focusing on the personal side of life after a major shift. Still, the biggest questions she gets on re-visioning retirement are about the financial piece. “People say to me, ‘I don't know that I'll ever be able to retire because I can't afford to’,” says Dr. Reid. “But no matter where you come from, and no matter how much or little money you have to be able to make your dreams a reality, a solid vision not only guides where you're going aspirationally – it helps you frame an appropriate financial strategy to get behind it.”
The confidence to tackle what’s next isn’t always easy, but Anna attributes hers to a hard line in terms of time and location.
“I have boundaries now because of the baby that I either didn't have before or wasn't able to enforce because I was caught in the corporate drudgery. And a financial safety net – that's a big thing. I have savings which mean that doing this isn't terrifying.” Her micro-retirement has also informed her long-term retirement plans. “I want to have financial stability when I'm no longer able to work. I've already got a good sum set aside from 15 years in decent salary jobs,” she says.
“I intend to put a chunk of whatever I make during this time towards my retirement fund. That will always be important to me.” If she were to have planned anything differently, she admits she’d have liked a bit more of a run-up to it. “That said, it'd probably be just enough time to put me off it and frighten me back into a corporate job. So it being unexpected probably wasn't the worst thing!”
Why the tools to build wealth are still out of reach for too many women.
Hearkening back to her pre-retirement visioning process, Dr. Reid notes that over three decades spent coming up with activities on how to vision, her takeaway is that the younger people who adopt this process, the better they get at it.
“People become worried when it comes to defining their purpose; it slows them down because they don’t feel they have just one,” she says. “But it’s multifactorial. My purpose is to be a wonderful mother to my kids. Another is to be a good daughter to my ageing parents. Then there’s my aspirational purpose to become more spiritual. It's never just one thing – but people get hung up on that one thing. So I always encourage just picking one aspiration – even if it seems small – and we'll work on a vision for that. The important thing is learning the process.”
For women in their 30s or 40s, Reid encourages looking at it like a warm-up lap. “You're doing a 5k to figure out how to do a marathon. You gradually move forward towards your bigger life aspirations once you get through smaller hurdles, but we're always re-visioning, because there are always new challenges and opportunities that emerge.” In terms of applying this re-visioning process to retirement, Dr. Reid encourages integrating the skills and learnings we gain from the said 5k into our “art of becoming.”
“We should think of ourselves as a blank canvas that we can repaint over if we want to. But hopefully, we’re just adding finer strokes as we get further along in the process.”
In Anna’s case, a vision was also key to pivoting. “What was helpful when I started to think about this new future life set-up was what an ideal day would look like,” she says. “In my ideal day, I didn't have an alarm go off, I didn't commute or sit in endless meetings. I spent time with my son, and in the afternoons, I dropped him at nursery while I got some writing done. There was time in it for sweet memories at home, walking by the sea, swimming, playing – but also time for me to use my brai,n making meaningful work on my schedule.”
Morgane didn’t think she’d retire at 27. During her undergraduate degree in Chicago, she felt unsure of what she really wanted to do. “I’ve always drawn and painted, but these sounded like interests or hobbies – not grown-up jobs,” she says.
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Now 32 and an at-home artist in the Hudson Valley, Morgane tells me, “There’s no retirement from here.”
It sounds contradictory – but makes perfect sense as she retraces the path to her pivot. “Out of university, I was recruited by a hedge fund and told myself: ‘This sounds like a job that will impress people.’ Within five seconds, I realised it was wrong but stuck it out.”
Seeking a plan that fit an “ambitious” narrative of what she was doing with her life, Morgane applied to law school. Within two weeks of landing at Yale, she felt it was equally wrong, yet was committed to a path towards a promising career. Her final semester coincided with the pandemic, so, being fully remote, Morgane moved in with her now-husband in New York City. “I rented a studio as a gift to myself before graduating – what I saw as a last hurrah to do the thing I really loved. Suddenly, I had all this time I had never given myself to paint. My work began to get good and exciting, and the world was so blown up, it felt like if I made this radical pivot, no one would notice me vanish. So I did.”
Upon graduating, Morgane was offered a position with a law firm, which, due to COVID, they agreed to postpone. “I took that year and ran hard at being an artist. When the year elapsed, it was impossible to imagine being anything else.” A friend in a more conventional corporate job told her he’d never taken an opportunity that didn’t involve an online application portal. “There can be a linear path from how you get from point A to point B, and you have to be the best of the people who apply through the system,” Morgane says to this.
“Art isn’t like that. It’s deeply relational. It’s about community building, putting yourself out there in a vulnerable way. With other careers, it can be clear what’s business and what’s personal, but in art, there isn’t that distinction.” As we get older, our circles inevitably narrow, but there’s something to hone in on when it comes to retirement: nurturing relationships.
“I’m reclaiming my happiness.”
Before Morgane made the leap, she and her husband talked about what life would look like if, instead of being two professionals, they’d be one, plus whatever she could make as an artist. “We spoke to a financial advisor and asked if we could do this,” she adds. Dr. Reid echoes what financial planners have long touted: start putting money away as early as you can. “The earlier you start saving, the better off you’ll be, because of the beauties of compound interest,” says Reid. “The same is true with the art of becoming. The earlier you learn to apply visioning to your life, the faster you embrace that ‘becoming’ transition to what you're aspiring towards.”
“If I’m lucky, I’ll never ‘retire’,” says Morgane. “Had I become a lawyer, I’d be working towards a certain expiration date. My husband is a cybersecurity engineer, so he’s very aware of retirement. But this is my life. This is my identity, my vocation, my passion. I hope that I’m 98 years old and in the studio, painting with arthritic hands.”
What about navigating the challenges of building relationships, I ask, for women who have just moved cities or, like Morgane, left the city? “Two things are helpful when it comes to community building,” she says. “Firstly, you just need one person. Once you find them, they’re going to have friends, those friends will have friends; then you build out. It really just takes one. Secondly, Instagram is an incredible tool for creatives. We’re all on there, and people are generous with their time and attention, especially if you’re a fellow artist. If you reach out and say you love someone’s work or that you’d like to connect – even if you just have an online connection and one day you’re in their city – you can use that to build meaningful relationships.”
“I don’t feel like I retired,” says Morgane on a final note. “I became more ambitious.”
For Claudia, 42, it was a perfect storm of “I-can’t-do-this-anymore” coupled with “I have finally managed to align things so that I don’t have to.”
“I was soon to turn 40 and found myself living in a city I had no real connection to – and hadn’t ever dreamed of living in – working in marketing, having formerly worked in journalism,” she recalls.
“I no longer had the opportunity to be creative, had no spare time, and worked long hours and late nights, which caused my health to suffer. I felt I had no freedom, and limited choice over who I worked with or for. I was gaining weight, constantly stressed, and felt the time slipping away to achieve my dreams: namely, writing fiction. I missed my family in Wales and friends abroad. My parents were getting older, my nieces and nephews were growing up, and with family in Australia, I had to mete out the small bits of time I had to stay connected. Visits home were a whirlwind of trying to see everyone, and never felt like enough. My friends in London were building families and moving further out and, as someone who was single and child-free by choice, I started to wonder what my life in London would look like in five years or ten. I was too burnt out to invest in myself, but felt that if I didn’t make my life into the shape I wanted, I’d miss the chance.”
“I never felt unsafe around the migrants. It felt like people were using my gender to justify their own opinions or actions.”
When Dr. Reid set out to write Re-visioning Retirement, it was for those at the retirement stage from their main work life chapter. But, she notes, people often continue working part-time or doing new things – hence why she expanded her research to the art of becoming.
“It provides an identity framework for people throughout their lives – especially for those younger. When they get to the retirement stage, people find themselves lacking an identity framework, even if their savings are on track.” Her goal is to help people explore the methods and questions that come up at any stage in life. “So, for example, if I’m moving, what is it that I'm not only hoping to gain, but to contribute? There’s a push and pull in the process. Who am I becoming in this chapter? What's my vision at this stage and who's coming with me?”
Back in her hometown in rural Wales, Claudia jokes that community is impossible to escape. “I’m very close to my family and see many of them daily. I was finally able to get a dog. I have flexibility to work remotely, so I try to spend time each year with friends abroad.”
While Claudia’s income is greatly reduced, so too are her living costs. “I used the money from the sale of my flat in London to get set up in Wales, and I cover living expenses through freelancing part-time or one-off projects.” The support of friends and family has also been invaluable to her transition. “Money can always be made, but time cannot, so whether I had the confidence or not, I just had to do it.” Nevertheless, the theme of retiring without really retiring reemerges. “Because I’m doing what I want to be doing, full retirement has kind of dropped down my list of priorities. Before, it felt like a desperate light at the end of the tunnel, whereas now my goal is to make sure I have financial stability for my old age. Stepping off a career path comes with a financial sacrifice and takes getting used to, but having a goal puts that in the background. I don’t want to stop writing, so retirement in the traditional sense doesn’t have the same urgency.”
Claudia’s focus is now on finishing, then publishing, her first book. “As long as I can write, pursue my projects, travel and spend time with family and friends, that’s enough of a vision for me.”
“I used to have my students ask themselves: how do I want to grow my network, and what do I want it to become?” says Dr. Reid. “As a friend often reminds me, it's all about connectivity. It’s what keeps us open. As a Qigong master I studied under years ago, would say, we're always in one of two states in life – no matter what the opportunities or challenges are that come to us. Either we're in a state of feeling like we're opening, or we're in a state of closing. Part of the art of becoming is figuring out how to, as much as we can, be in that state of opening. This means putting yourself into a state of receptivity and openness, as much as possible.”
“I believed we were in love, but when I looked back, his lies were right there in front of me.”
