Purpose, People, and Core Pursuits: Key Ingredients to a Happy Retirement

Robert Brokamp (0:02)

The importance of income investing, swan money, and friendship in retirement. Today on the Saturday, personal finance edition of the Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing podcast.

I'm Robert Brokamp, and today is part two of my conversation with Wes Moss. Wes is a certified financial planner, the chief investment strategist at Capital Investment Advisors in Atlanta, the host of The Retire Sooner podcast, and the author of five books, including his latest, The Retire Sooner Method, The Five Secrets Behind America's Happiest and Unhappiest Retirees.

We may return to the financial part as well, but I do want to get into the non-financial part. The phrase always is, you don't want to retire from something, you want to retire to something. What I think is great about your research and your book is that you really boil it down to specific things to be thinking about. Starting first with core pursuits. Tell us how you define core pursuits and what's the difference in terms of the happiest retirees on the block versus the unhappiest retirees.

Wes Moss (1:05)

Another revelation to me here is the thought that we will find our purpose, which makes sense, or it'll show up at our door and knock, like you get an Amazon package, you get some toothpaste and your next life purpose. Prime delivery tomorrow, it's going to show up. It's never going to show. It's never going to show up. It'll never be found and it's never going to drop into our laps. It has to be created. The way we create it is intentionally being creative around what are the things that are going to bring me daily purpose and a schedule. The two pieces of this equation, again, very new in this book relative to what I wrote about before. It's a lot of core pursuits, our hobbies on steroids, they are super activities. If you do them once or twice a year, it doesn't count. That's not a core pursuit, it's not a love. You're not anticipating it. But if you're doing something regularly every week, a couple of times a week or maybe once a month or a couple of times a year and you're anticipating it, those are powerful motivators to keep us engaged and create daily purpose that ultimately rolls up into our annual or life purpose that we've created. It is an activity that we don't just like, we love it and we do it regularly and we anticipate doing it more often and getting better at it, etc.

That falls into the camp of a core pursuit. The other thing that was interesting that we found is that the average happy retiree spends more time doing these core pursuits each week relative to the unhappy group in a very significant way. So it's not just the number which should be five or more.

It is the amount of time spent doing those core pursuits that is so important.

Robert Brokamp (2:56)

You point out a few other aspects that seem to contribute to something being a core pursuit as opposed to just a pastime. I'll just reference once again the studies that show that the number one activity of retirees is watching television on average four to six hours a day, which is not part of being a happy retiree.

One thing you point out is that the core pursuits are adventure related because they sort of keep you growing, keep you exploring, and you hit it on it a little bit too in terms of something called anticipatory happiness, which sort of adds a little extra layer to making these adventure related things like travel, going to an RV, going hiking, makes them a little bit more like a core pursuit.

Wes Moss (3:40)

There's something about adventure, and I was able to look at in the research, all these different core pursuit related categories, and it was interesting. The one that stood out that had the biggest difference, I've always said doesn't matter, at least in my mind, the kind of core pursuit you have doesn't matter. And I said that for a lot of years. And that may be slightly wrong. Many of the different categories that we parsed out and compared, there was not a significant difference between a happy versus unhappy retiree that both do the core pursuit. There wasn't a material difference in happiness for almost anything we looked at. So, I still maintain that more and different unique core pursuits, that still matters the most. But in the adventure section, it did have a very significant difference. If we plotted the unhappy retiree group averaged only about one adventure related core pursuit total. Meanwhile, the happiest retirees on the block, the ATROB camp, they averaged almost two. It's a big difference, and it was very statistically significant. And it made me think about, well, why is an adventure core pursuit? Which again, to your point, that's travel, RV, it is hunting, it is fishing, it is, you could probably put, hilla-skiing. That sounds adventurous to me. Mountain climbing. There's something about an adventure-related core pursuit, seeing the world in a slightly new way, that does give us this wonderful anticipatory happiness, and we enjoy that, in my opinion, as much as the trip itself.