Bonnie Sewell is a longtime columnist with Rethinking65. Read more of her articles here.
Bonnie Sewell
Fifty-six years of working is enough. My husband, Murray, retired last year at age 67. He says nobody should retire into a northern Virginia winter. The months of gray skies with cold temperatures, and without snow to push or play in, felt relentless to him. I agree, so I will retire, also at 67, into a Williamsburg, Va., winter in early 2025 with Murray at my side. There we can play golf a lot more days of the year than where we live today.
Golf is a cliché choice of recreation for many financial advisors. While I’ve never secured clients from golf, the time outside chasing a small ball has led to friendships and fresh perspective. For women, I think it is an underused path to meaningful friendship.
Murray and I have worked from the age of ten earning money through babysitting and paper routes. We are both products of single-mom households. I went to college on work-study; he went into the Air Force, then used the GI Bill to go to college after. We just kept working. Saving and investing over more than forty-five years ensures we have enough to meet our needs. At this moment, there isn’t any amount paid work that I want to trade for more of my free time.
Change of Plans For This Financial Advisor
When I sold my company in 2021, I fully expected to work another 10 to 15 years. I could blame age and its accelerating infirmities, I could blame being an owner-employee vs. the owner, I could blame the job which has changed. But really, I’ve changed.
The last six months have brought too many reminders that time might be shorter than I thought. Health issues for one or the other of us has taken a toll. Most have been minor, but the last one involved Murray heading to the ICU in an ambulance for a pacemaker. That can change your perspective in a hurry.
Our current home sits on more than seven acres of land with elevation changes. There are too many flower beds and a barn to care for. The almost mile-long gravel roads that lead to our mailbox on the main road have lost their romance. We’re looking to move to flat ground on a paved road where we don’t have to contemplate cardio capabilities just to retrieve our daily mail.
For most of my life, I couldn’t think of what to do if I wasn’t working, achieving, earning. School wasn’t my favorite place although I managed to earn advanced degrees and certifications. Those were in service to the altar of better work, higher pay.
Several people I respect challenged me to think of things I might spend my days (and nights) on if I wasn’t working. Genuinely stumped, I couldn’t come up with much that sounded enticing enough to move away from helping people figure out their financial divisions in divorce or stewarding clients’ financial futures through great planning and investing.
‘Life Goes On’ After Financial Advising
Our industry is possessed with succession planning. Some of this is panic from the “what if you get hit by a bus syndrome?” I know a little something about that because my Uncle Jim stepped off a curb in Chicago one fine morning only to be hit by a CTA bus (may he rest in peace). Life goes on. When my doctor, dentist, CPA or attorney retires, they are not going to sweat who I will see in place of them. Their admins will let me know at the first appointment after they’re gone.
It’s good to be proud of one’s work but I succumbed to the myth that I and only I could do the job the way it should be done.
Benefiting from the demographic tsunami of boomers retiring, I’ve collected many, many stories of others moving on to really meaningful lives after they retired from paid work. Each time I find one I relate to, I reach out to talk anyone up who would entertain my persistent worries and questions.
“Twenty-four hours is a LOT of time, what do you do all day?”
“If you’re not ‘fill-in-the-blank’ that lets others know who you are, who are you?”
“How do you make new friends if all you’ve done is work and work some more?”
“If you’re not notching achievements, what’s the point of your activity?”
As I’d recite these over and over, eventually, I started hearing how silly they were. I was trapped in a common belief that paid work is a higher calling than anything else.
Expanding My Horizons Post-Financial Advising
Having traveled more in the last five years than in the prior fifty, I’ve seen for myself that you can live a great life more simply. Folks in the well-studied and currently popular Blue Zones live the basics of eating, socializing, cooking and finding purpose very differently than I have. What they do is within reach for me if I change the way I spend my time, directing more of my day to pursuits that nourish my brain and body.
I remember when I made stained glass and refinished furniture as a side interest. I’ve taken writing classes to sharpen the skill of storytelling in print. I’m quickly improving my cooking skills with healthy food that tastes better than the processed food I’m trying to stop eating. I want to swim daily laps again, not to compete, but to breathe better. Methodical swimming is a lot like my practice of transcendental meditation in that it releases negative mental energy and brings calm. I have my Library of Congress card and all that entails.
The choice to retire to Williamsburg came after a search for the way we want to live. It checks most boxes that matter to us. The College of William & Mary offers an Osher Lifelong Learning Institute and it will be 10 minutes from my new home. [The Osher Foundation supports Lifelong Learning Institutes at 125 colleges and universities nationwide.] There are rivers and more paths than I can possibly walk in the years I have left.
More Time for a Dozen Grandchildren
My Merlin ID app that identifies the sounds of birds gets a workout every time I visit Williamsburg. We have two grandchildren who live there and great transportation options to see the ten who live elsewhere. There is golf galore. It’s a small town much like the towns Murray and I grew up in: Clarendon Hills, Illinois, for me and York, Pennsylvania, for him. On visits, locals have engaged freely with us and those small interactions are part of the feast of life I look forward to enjoying daily. It’s time for the G.A.P. year I never had, Grandma@play.
My favorite line from The Fellowship of the Ring in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, is Gandalf’s “All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.” While there might be a few nice trips, I don’t have a bucket list of must-have experiences except for one. I exercise on an indoor rower and I do plan to seek out a row on actual water in a racing shell. Williamsburg has that too.
I know now there is life after work. I’m grateful for the choices we have today because of the choices we’ve made in earlier years. Six months from now, I will be living a life with different priorities I’m responsible for building. I can’t wait.
Bonnie A. Sewell, CFP, AIF, CEPA, CDFA, is a managing director and senior wealth advisor at Dakota Wealth Management. She can be reached at bsewell@dakotawm.com
