In 1976, an American gerontologist called Robert Atchley tried to map what happens to people when they stop working.
What he described has stood up remarkably well in the fifty years since. Retirement, he suggested, tends to arrive in phases. First a honeymoon: the lie-ins, the trips, the joy of a Monday morning with nowhere to be. Then, for many people, disenchantment, the point where the novelty wears off and a harder question surfaces: what exactly am I for now? Then, if things go well, reorientation, as people rebuild a routine and a sense of purpose. And eventually stability.
Notice what isn’t on that list. Not one of those phases is about money.
We have a rough rule of thumb in this office based on a couple of decades of retiring clients: retirement is about 75% emotional and 25% rational. The 25% is the part everyone prepares for. The pension, the drawdown rate, the tax on withdrawals, whether the money lasts. It’s important, it’s solvable, and it’s where nearly all the planning effort goes.
The 75% is the part that actually decides whether people are happy.
It shows up in ways the spreadsheet never predicts. The senior partner who was dreading nothing about retirement except the moment he realised nobody needed to ring him anymore. The couple who’d planned every detail of the finances and had never once discussed what an ordinary Tuesday would look like with both of them at home. The client who’d saved diligently for thirty years and, faced with the freedom to spend it, found she felt guilty doing so.
None of those were money problems. All of them showed up, eventually, in the money.
Because the emotional side doesn’t stay politely in its lane. The person who’s lost their sense of purpose can make rash decisions to fill the gap: the business venture, the property project, the investment someone at the golf club recommended. The person who never settled what “enough” means can’t stop saving, or can’t stop worrying, however good the numbers look. Disenchantment has a cost, and it’s often paid in capital.
Which is why the most useful retirement conversations we have usually start somewhere other than the pension. What will you do on a Tuesday? Who will you see? What did work give you, apart from a salary, and where will that come from now? What would you regret not doing while you still have the legs for it?
They’re harder questions than “what’s my drawdown rate,” and they don’t have tidy answers. But they shape the numbers far more than the numbers shape them. Plan the 25% without the 75% and you can end up with a perfectly funded retirement that nobody is enjoying.
Atchley’s last phase, for the record, isn’t death. He called it termination: the end of retirement as a defining role, when it stops being the main thing about you and simply becomes how you live.
That’s the goal, really. Not a retirement that works on paper. One you stop noticing because it feels natural.
We help people in Hook and across Hampshire, Surrey, Berkshire, Sussex and Kent plan for both halves of retirement, starting with the one nobody puts in a spreadsheet.
Altor Wealth Management LLP is authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA number 769033). Registered office: Landmark House, Station Road, Hook, Hampshire RG27 9HA. This article is general information, not personal advice. Client examples are composites drawn from experience, not individual cases. The value of investments can fall as well as rise.