Creating a New Retirement Blueprint

**Christine Kashkari** (0:07)
Most retirement planning conversations start and end with a number. How much do you need? Are you on track? But retirement isn't a singular event, it's a process, and getting it right requires rethinking much of what we think we know.
Welcome to season two of Better Vantage by Vanguard, a podcast series hosted by custom content from WSJ and Vanguard. I'm your host, Christine Kashkari, Editorial Director at WSJ Custom Programming, and with me is my co-host in this series and our resident expert, Joe Davis, Global Chief Economist at Vanguard.

**Joe Davis** (0:39)
Great to be back, Christine.

**Christine Kashkari** (0:40)
Today we are also joined by Christine Benz, Director of Personal Finance and Retirement Planning at Morningstar. She's also the host of the Longview Podcast and author of the book How to Retire, 20 Lessons for a Happy, Successful and Wealthy Retirement, a worthy goal for all of us. Thank you, Christine, for being here.

**Christine Benz** (0:58)
Thank you, Christine and Joe, for having me on. It's a real pleasure.

**Joe Davis** (1:01)
Christine, thank you for joining. And for many of our listeners, they will know Christine by name. But if you don't, probably the foremost expert on retirement writ large. She's informed my thinking in my personal life, as an investment professional.
And what I'm looking forward to today, let's get beyond just the numbers. The nest egg's important. Let's push our thinking into topics that maybe aren't as discussed as much.

**Christine Kashkari** (1:26)
That's what I'm excited about. Not just the financial aspects, but the non-financial components and dimensions.

**Christine Benz** (1:31)
When you think about retiring, that's the part of retirement that I underrated. Frankly, I had been so focused on the numbers, but the whole dimension of transitioning to life after retirement without work is a big deal that we should be talking more about.

**Christine Kashkari** (1:47)
So let's start with reframing how you think about retirement. It's the journey, not the destination.

**Christine Benz** (1:52)
Absolutely. This idea of retirement is a hard stop is pretty antiquated, I think, where you have kind of an on-off switch. One day, you're working, the next day, you're not.
A much better model for retirement is the gradual phase in the glide path, if you will, where maybe post-age 50, you start giving some thought to what you like about work, what you don't like about work. If you can sort of actively negotiate with your employer, maybe do it in the background where you're not really sharing. But try to switch your work around so you're doing more of things you enjoy, less of what you don't enjoy. And of course, that's kind of a luxury good in this jobs market. But the idea is work is good for us. So if we can do some version of work longer, that redounds to a healthier, happier, longer life. The data suggests that people who work longer are happier and healthier.

**Joe Davis** (2:53)
I'm in my mid-50s. I'm not going to share too much here. But I know the date's coming, the process is coming, but I haven't really given it too much thought. So help me, let's say, like what's the next steps I should be doing? Help me out.

**Christine Benz** (3:06)
Yeah. So a great practice is to do a trial retirement. I call it a faux-tirement. If you have a couple of weeks off from work, we have a sabbatical program where I work, where we get six weeks off.
Those are wonderful times to not necessarily do the vacation, but at least spend a week if you can in your home base. Take stock of what do these days feel like? What does that lack of structure feel like? And if it's too short a time period, you probably have vacation stuff on your mind that might not be the best test case. Ideally, you would have a couple of weeks. We are thinking about what am I doing for relaxation, but also what's giving me purpose and a sense of mattering if I'm not working? What are those things that bring me that sense of, I'm still contributing here and I still matter to the world? That is a secret to happy retirement. So trial run it. This idea of retirement as a long vacation is another model that's not so great and a little bit out of date. And certainly people do have pent up demand for leisure activities coming into retirement. They should pursue those things. But you also need some things to relax from. Some things where you're making a little bit of a difference, you're mattering in some fashion. This whole mattering idea is quite important in retirement. It's something that we probably have in our workplaces. When we walk out of there, we might not naturally have that. And people should think about things like, oh, it's maybe babysitting grandkids one day a week, or volunteering in your community.