Welcome to Life Chapters, Money Choices, the podcast where we turn the pages on life’s big transitions. This week, we return to a question we often talk about on the podcast, and it’s a question we spend years preparing for: retirement. Specifically this week, life beyond work. We often focus on whether we can afford to retire. We calculate the number: how much is going to be enough? We talk about drawdowns and healthcare costs and inflation and where we’re going to live. But there’s another question that perhaps doesn’t get nearly enough attention: what am I actually going to retire to? Retirement is often described as the moment when we finally have the freedom to do what we want. But leaving work creates more than free time. It also creates mental space. Our guest today is John Arnesen, who has been thinking rather deeply about this. He described retirement not simply as getting your time back, but as getting your mind back as well. John has also done something interesting. Before he retired, he began deliberately constructing what he calls a parallel life, something Kim Potgieter has advocated for so often on this podcast. Kim, it’s great to have you back. John, welcome to Life Chapters, Money Choices. This really, Kim, is in your wheelhouse as well. But John, I want you to kick us off. Take us back and tell us a little bit more about your journey and how you came to, firstly, meet the Chartered Wealth team and, secondly, start developing this idea around a parallel life.

JOHN ARNESEN

Thank you, Michael, and hi. Good morning. Yes, let me start in 2006. I’d been working in education before that. I had some money. It was invested with brokers and things, and I wasn’t really interested in the money side of things. I got a job at the Financial Planning Institute. They wanted to improve the education side of the FPI, so they brought me in as the FPI CEO. At that time, it just so happened the Financial Planner of the Year competition was running at the FPI, and John Campbell, who we all know well, was a young guy then. He’s not going to like hearing this. He’d applied to become the Financial Planner of the Year, and he won. So, in 2007, I’d sorted a lot of the education stuff out at the FPI. I thought to myself, well, I’d better get my stuff sorted. My background was in education. I knew nothing about money, and they brought me in to look at all the government regulations. Lots of stuff was happening in the education space on the legislation side. I’d like to think I fixed some of that, Kim. Anyway, the point is that’s where I met John. That’s where I met Chartered Wealth. John said, ‘Your finances are in a mess.’ I said, ‘Thank you. Will you be my financial planner?’ He put a plan together in 2007. By 2016, when I turned 60, I was able to retire. I decided I didn’t want a boss anymore. I was tired of bosses, so I went into consulting. I started Arnesen and Associates, and it was this transition into retirement because, mentally, now I was 60, I didn’t have to work for a boss. My children had grown up and were successful in their own right. We had this retirement thing because the plan was: I want to be able to retire in 2016 if I can. But I worked until I turned 70, which was January this year. This year I said, maybe I should do this proper retirement thing. So I’ve reduced my clients this year, and I’ve got more time and more thinking time. That’s when I started to think: what occupies my mind? Not only what occupies my time, but what do I think about? Because before that, you’ve got 10 clients, you’re busy, your head is going. That’s where I am, and I’ve been thinking about that. That’s what I’m quite keen to talk about.

Michael Avery

You’ve written a great article on it as well, which really sparked this conversation today. But just as an introductory thought, Kim, you see people approaching retirement from the other direction. How often do people arrive having done the financial planning beautifully, but having given remarkably little thought to what is going to replace that sense of structure and relevance?

Kim Potgieter

I see that more where people have actually looked after the money because, when we hear the word retirement, the only thing we’ve really been educated about retirement in the past is money: that we need to get it in place because we can’t retire without it. So I have seen many people who come to work with us who’ve looked after their money, thank goodness. That’s one area done. But this area of what you’re going to do with your time, what John’s told us, is such an important topic. What goes on in this brain of ours? What are the stories we keep telling ourselves? What are these beliefs that we’ve picked up, and how much is that influencing our reality? For me, always, the topic that you’ve brought in is: what are you retiring to? It’s my standard question. We don’t want to retire from something; we want to retire to something.

Michael Avery

In your calculus, John, when did you start thinking about that question? Given that you were in the Chartered stable, you were obviously well aware of the thinking and the process. Did that influence the way you started approaching your own story? What I’ve liked about your story is this concept, almost, of retirement as a dimmer switch. It’s not on-off. You started slowly turning that dial, moving from active work, busy 24/7 or nine to five, whatever you want to call it, to then, in your 60s, maybe consulting, and now to a point where I’m sure you’re playing a bit more pickleball.

JOHN ARNESEN

Pickleball, yeah. Pickleball is certainly keeping me nicely busy. But what I did find, as my client base reduced quite significantly, was that I had the spare time. Then I thought about my mum and dad. Sorry, they both passed on, but they’re examples of, what do we call those before the boomers? My dad just went and sat in a chair, and he became a recluse. Unfortunately, my mum cleaned. Her time was cleaning and cooking, and she became grumpy because neither of them had this conversation. So for me, even though in 2006 John fixed my financial stuff, it was only when Kim, my good friend Kim, came along and asked these questions. Right now I’m getting cold shivers thinking about it because she asked the difficult questions. What are you going to think about? What are you going to do once you’ve retired? The reality is, only once I started to have spare time this year, real spare time, like a day, and I’d wake up, did I start to say, well, what do I need to do? Then I’ve started to frame that in what I like doing. I like writing, so I’ve started to write articles like this, but I write lots of articles. I’m starting to write a book about the family. I’m writing a lot. So I’m starting to fill my brain and my time with things that make me think positively and constructively and reflectively, as opposed to my mother. Sorry, bless you, Mum. It’s like, ‘I’ve got to clean the kitchen.’ I’m not sure why it had to be so clean.

Michael Avery

But what you’re describing, I think, is so typical of that silent generation. My father was very similar in that he just became a recluse, sat in his chair and eventually passed away in his early 70s. My mum has railed against that a little bit. So go, Mum. I’m glad she’s found a new lease on life. But there was a line running through your article that I think is quite profound. For decades, work effectively tells us what deserves our attention. Now suddenly none of those things, the budget, the deadline, the colleagues, the million emails, deserve our attention. What does that freedom actually feel like?

JOHN ARNESEN

It’s scary. For me, the word occupation is a better word than a job because, when you have an occupation, you’re occupied and you think about it. The 16 hours that you’re awake, you’re thinking about whatever you do. Kim does her stuff; you do your stuff, Michael. Suddenly it’s: what do you occupy your time with? When I had that spare time, I started to say, I can go down the rabbit hole and sit and do social media for two hours a day. Social media takes you down a doom-and-gloom path, or I can do other things. It is very scary. It’s a shock to your system, even to me, hey. I was at the FPI, I’ve had all the theory and I’ve listened to Kim talk a million times. I’m listening to you, Kim. But when it hits you, it is still a wave, and it’s a shock. You have to work through it. That’s the thing.

Michael Avery

Even if you’re preparing for it, it still hits you, and it’s still a shock. Do we underestimate, Kim, how psychologically powerful it is to be occupied and to be needed in a job or an occupation where, all of a sudden, you’re not as occupied or as needed? Even if you have been planning for it, you’re not going to be as occupied as you were when you were working.

Kim Potgieter

I think so many times we take things for granted. When you are needed, when you are busy, that’s just what it is. As John’s explaining here now, when you’re so busy, you don’t even have the time to think. The question, when I ask it, and I’ve mentioned it so many times on the podcast, is: what will your next chapter look like if it turns out well? People don’t have the space to give me the answer. People don’t have the space to think about it. Then they don’t give themselves the gift of finding the time to do it. What they do, and it’s maybe just like your mum, is work on things that they can control. She could control cleaning, so she cleaned, and she felt in control. When we’re at work, I have the same discussion so many times. I go, ‘Please don’t give everything to your company.’ When you’re coming up to retirement, please don’t give everything of yourself to your company. You need to hold some back so that you’ve got time to think about what you’re going to. When you leave your company, they’re not there for you on the day that you retire, or the next month, or the six months, or the year. Yet it’s in our psyche and it’s our personality traits that we want to do it well. We want to leave on a high, we want to give them everything, we want to be leaving with a good name. So we don’t spend that time doing this thinking. What John is explaining, and the way he does it, for me, it’s beautiful because he’s being vulnerable. He’s saying that even though I had all the theory, even though I’d listened to it so many times, until you do it, you don’t understand. I don’t want to frighten people by telling them that. So always have the support. Ask for the help. Don’t be alone on this because, if you’re alone on this, this can make that brain and the mind go crazy.

Michael Avery

Well, there’s that old saying: forewarned is forearmed. That’s why I like the conversation that we’re having, because it’s not about frightening people; it’s just about making people aware. It’s an awareness thing. I don’t think we are as aware of this hugely difficult transition, frightening and everything that comes along with it. There’s a difference between being occupied and being engaged as well, John, because you can have a really busy retirement. You can be golfing on Monday, lunch on Tuesday, pickleball on Wednesday, grandchildren on Thursday, and still feel strangely empty.

JOHN ARNESEN

Yeah. In fact, there’s a series that Kim’s running on Alzheimer’s and mental stuff, and I’m not a specialist. But for me, the reason I’m also applying my mind to what I think about is because I think the better I use my brain… I’m not just talking about doing a crossword puzzle once a day. I try to do those anyway, Wordle and Strands. I think about important things, constructive things, because, as I said earlier, you can become depressed and think the world’s coming to an end. Well, I don’t think so. I think AI is going to be good for the world, for example. But I think about it and I’m able to argue the case, as opposed to saying, ‘Oh no, AI is the end of the world.’ It is how, for the 16 hours you’re awake, you use your mind. You don’t have to be an extrovert. I mean, it’s not me. I’m here behind this mic and I’m actually quite nervous. I can feel the tingles in my body. I’m not relaxed. But you don’t have to be an extrovert, as long as you are thinking. Of course, you’ve got to do as well. I can’t sit in a chair the whole day and think. I’m not Plato. No, we’ve got to keep ourselves physically engaged as well as mentally. For example, I’ve gone back to the philosophers and said, what are their fundamental philosophies? I’m not trying to get into that now, but that’s the kind of level of thinking I’m trying to do, to keep my brain working on complex problems. And curiosity.

Kim Potgieter

I was going to say, John, what you’re talking about is being curious. We know, or some of us don’t know because we think we’re alone and we’re the only person doing it, but we have like 50,000 to 60,000 thoughts a day. This brain of ours is continuously going. What we don’t learn is to control it. We are designed to look for negativity. We’re designed to see challenges because that’s what keeps us safe. For many people, and I do see a lot of depression in retirement, a lot of depression, I see so much negativity. People can tell me everything that’s going wrong, and sometimes I just want to give them a hug, but it’s not appropriate. In real terms, we have a choice to work on the thoughts that we’re thinking. It’s what John’s talking about. We have that choice to go, ‘Actually, what’s happening right now is me self-destructing. I am sabotaging my own life because I can think about all of this negativity, or I can take a bit of risk to go out there and find joy.’ I think this is the important thing: to make a choice that you want to go and look for joy. The first place that I always tell people to go look for joy is to make their worlds a little bit bigger than themselves and go and help someone else. If we go out there and find a way, a random act of kindness or helping someone in need, it is incredible how we feel different. It is incredible. When we hang around with happier people, it’s contagious. We start getting happier. But if we stay in our own mind and go down that rabbit hole of everything that’s wrong, it is so hard to get clients back out of that. It really is. Retirement is one of those times. I have that diagram that I always show people. It’s called the sigmoid curve. We’re running the parallel life, like John was running the parallel life. But he had two choices. He could take his parallel life up, or he could take his parallel life down. That is where we get into a point where it’s really hard to come out of the negativity, to come out of the depression. Normally it’s because we’re going to make our world too small. We become insular. We stay on our own, we stay in our homes. I’m not talking about being extroverts only. One friend, one person that you help. There’s always a place to start. It’s not just that next we’re this big optimist.

Michael Avery

We live in South Africa. There is so much need, so much opportunity to get out there and help. Having recently interviewed Adrian Gore about his new book, The Four Principles, that’s one of his key principles. Anyone who knows Adrian, who’s ever listened to him talk, will know he talks a lot about this kind of disciplined optimism. Not Pollyanna, happy-clappy. It’s a brilliant word. It’s a brilliant way of looking at it. It’s just saying we are hard-coded, hard-wired to seek out negative things. When we were on the savannahs and the plains, or were hunter-gatherers, it kept us alive. We needed to know if that was going to kill us or if something was hunting us. Now we actually have to recode ourselves to be positive-seeking machines. How did you approach that, John? It looks like it would be easier for you. You just come across as someone who is naturally more optimistic, or am I misreading you?

JOHN ARNESEN

Is that something that you’ve had to work on? My wife, Meryl, hello, Meryl. She gets irritated with me because I am just hopeful all the time. The worst thing can happen, and I’ll try to find something good about it. It’s wired in me, and I don’t know where that comes from, but I’m grateful for that. Beyond that, I try to keep fit. I do exercise every day. Having a fit body is one thing, but I can’t remember the doctor’s name you spoke about. Dr Ranchod. Dr Kirti Ranchod, yes. Her talks reminded me that my brain is the most important, for want of a better word, muscle.

Michael Avery

Yeah.

JOHN ARNESEN

I have to work my brain every day as well. This is where using my mind positively and constructively comes in. I don’t know, I’m in dangerous territory, but I know that the harder you make your brain think and the harder you make your brain work, it’s like exercise, push-ups. Don’t just do 10, do 20. It’s better for you, and it will be better for you in the long term. That’s how it all fits together. But primarily, I am an optimist. I have faith. I believe this country is going to be extraordinary one day. It’s not bad at the moment. I’m not a doom-and-gloom guy, ever. I’m not over the top in that Adrian Gore thing. I’m not like, ‘Yay, hurrah,’ but I do see the good side of stuff.

Michael Avery

Yeah, it doesn’t serve us. I’m a journalist. We’re professional cynics and sceptics. It’s what we’ve got to do. I’ve got to constantly fight back against that because otherwise I can become overly negative. I’ve become very aware of my own innate bias to be negative-seeking and have really tried to challenge that in my own thinking. But John, I want to come back to the parallel life. What I particularly like about your story as well is that you didn’t wait. You really set about it. You began constructing this parallel life. What did that mean in practice? Just by way of example, so that people can start thinking about what that entails.

JOHN ARNESEN

So, in 2016, I’d started Arnesen and Associates. Lots of the energy in those first few months was setting up the website, writing the mission and the vision and the values and all that stuff that I learned out of the textbooks. Then it was to find clients, and I realised finding clients is quite difficult. You can’t just put something on LinkedIn and get a client. You actually work very hard and have a lot of coffees. It took me time to build up my client base and realise what my clients wanted from me. But that all was fantastic because 2016 was a good year. By 2017, I was able to say, ‘I’ve got enough clients now. I’m busy.’ But now, I love working with young people. I know this is not maybe… but really young people. My last client, I think the average age was 35. Some older people, but I’m an old person to them, eh? ‘You’re young. You’re a young 70.’ Yeah, it’s interesting in the world of work, and I’m becoming more realistic.

Michael Avery

But did you, obviously, in the nuts and bolts of setting up the business, that kept you busy, kept you occupied, but in the planning, did you have this idea that, right, this is probably something I’m going to do for another five to ten years? Then you mentioned turning 70.

JOHN ARNESEN

I had a much more glamorous plan. Arnesen and Associates was going to become the next PwC consultancy. It was Associates, it was Arnesen, so it was my daughter. She hadn’t got married then, but now she’s married with children and she’s a stay-at-home mummy, so that whole plan failed. She was going to become the successor, this whole plan. Then I realised, no, time is not on my side. I’m not growing a business for anybody. I have a financial plan that is okay, thanks, John, and Chartered Wealth, I should say, which is John. So I just rolled the business and turned it almost into a hobby. I’m sorry to my clients if anybody’s listening.

Kim Potgieter

But you loved what you were doing.

JOHN ARNESEN

I loved what I was doing.

Kim Potgieter

And you added value for your clients.

JOHN ARNESEN

But now I want to do other stuff. That’s where I am.

Kim Potgieter

Yeah, but that’s perfectly fine.

Michael Avery

Not every business is aiming to become the next PwC, and there are very good medium and small enterprises that just continue to tick over. There’s nothing wrong with that.

Kim Potgieter

But what’s important here is that it wasn’t a failure because it didn’t. I think that’s the big thing. In so many of the conversations that I have, and this is where I hit a stumbling block a lot of times with people, I go, ‘What you’re going to do in the next chapter, I want you to phase out of what you’ve been doing into something else, phase into retirement.’ The way John’s done it, where he slowed down a little bit but he was still working, now he’s able to consider retirement maybe in a more traditional way. But when I say that they’re going to earn half of what they used to earn, this is where the problem comes in because the brain goes, ‘My ego,’ and it is ego. ‘I used to get, let’s just say, a hundred thousand. Now you want me to work for 50, or even half of that.’ I go, ‘Yes, but what are you getting back for it?’ You’re contributing, you’re making a difference, and at the same time you’re getting paid, but you’re getting some flexibility and more time. The consideration is different because you’ve got to define success differently. If your old definition of success is applied, John would have gone, ‘I’ve been a failure. It hasn’t worked.’ But no, it did work. He added value. He did some mentoring, he did some interning with these younger people. At the same time, he earned a bit of money because he didn’t have to eat into as much of his capital as he would have had to if he hadn’t.

Michael Avery

Yeah. That’s the point I was making. That was the plan.

JOHN ARNESEN

Yeah. That’s Chartered Wealth’s plan. For the last 10 years, largely we’ve left the capital to grow. Now, from next year, we are primarily living on the pension fund. If I do make a bit of money next year, it’ll be fun money, but it’s not in the plan anymore. Up until this year, it was in the plan.

Michael Avery

For you psychologically, that feels sometimes like stepping off a cliff for some people. I know.

Kim Potgieter

No, there’ll still be hand-holding with John. One thing about John, you’re listening to him, I’ve had days when we’ve sat together where I hold John’s hand. I’m teasing you, but where he has been worried. You do need to have, and I think I mentioned it in the beginning, the support, the reassurance. Actually, we’re still on track, and that’s what the reviews do. Look at us, we’re still on track. We’re going to be fine. Again, when you’re left on your own, the mind does incredible things. You can feel that you’ve got enough, and in 24 hours you can believe you’re going to be destitute. Your worst fears start playing in your brain. When you start drawing down on your money, nobody can prepare you for that feeling. Just like nobody can prepare you for when your phone doesn’t ring and people aren’t looking for you anymore. I’ve watched the pain people go through when they’re drawing down that money. That number that used to grow is now coming down, and it’s a psychological change. I think, John, we’ll still have discussions around that.

unknown

John?

JOHN ARNESEN

Okay, now that conversation, or what Kim’s just said, has just made me nervous. But I’ll deal with that when I have to deal with that.

Michael Avery

Yeah, well, the thing is you’re at least aware of it. You’re talking about it. I think a lot of this does come from surfacing these issues before they arrive, not being blindsided by them as well. It will never take away the emotion and the feeling. I don’t think anyone can ameliorate that just through process. But I want to come back to identity. I think so much of our identity is woven into what we do and who we were and the title. How did you start thinking about, I don’t want to call it a loss of identity, but a changing of identity, or an evolution of your identity?

JOHN ARNESEN

Well, in the early days, because Arnesen and Associates was a small little business, I called myself the managing director. People say, ‘Well?’ ‘Oh no, I’m the MD of my company.’ It sounded really impressive. But in the end, it really didn’t even bother me. I’m just John. There are people, I live in a retirement space, there’s two villages that are close, and some people will introduce themselves: ‘Hello, how are you?’ You will know within 30 seconds that they worked at Anglo or some important organisation, or they were some important person, and they’re 80 years old. My goodness, it’s not important anymore. But it is to them, I suppose. So for me, I’m just John and I’m happy with who I am. I don’t hanker back to anything or any title or any important stuff.

Kim Potgieter

But I think what’s nice as well is to look at the ‘and’ in your life and to be able to say, ‘I’m John. Maybe I’m the managing director, and I’m a father, I’m a grandfather, I’m a husband, I’m a friend. I contribute to society. I make the world a better place by being in it.’ When we can see our identities as the word ‘and’, and ‘and’ has become my favourite word of the year, by the way. We have hard times and we have good times. If we all think that everything is just going to be amazing, we’re going to be sorely disappointed all the time. Why do we have challenges? So that we know when we’re having joy. It’s a little bit like that, I think, with this whole identity. It’s to maybe expand our identities and to look at the different roles that we have. Deep down, who are we without all of those roles?

JOHN ARNESEN

But Kim, it’s important that you know that in yourself. I’m thinking, yesterday there was a conversation, and men are interesting. We really have egos that are ridiculous, and everybody’s telling me how important they were in their jobs. I’m like, ‘Okay, well, I worked for government. I was a civil servant.’ It doesn’t matter to me. I think I’m a good husband, Meryl. I’m a good dad, I’m a good grandfather, I’m a good friend. I’m a good family guy. I think I fit in nicely with my community. It’s exactly what you’re saying. Those are all my ‘ands’. Those are the important things. When I go to pickleball and everybody’s like, ‘Hello, John. How are you? We missed you,’ I’m like, ‘Yay, I’m doing okay.’

Michael Avery

Yeah. I think within that is such an important point: you can be retiring and you can continue to work at the same time, but work at a dialled-down level. You talk about those individuals who still introduce themselves by their business cards of 10 years ago. Their personality types are all different, and I think some people might fall into a trap as well, Kim, of potentially turning retirement into work 2.0. We’ve got to realise that we don’t have to fill all of the time constantly. I think we also need to be comfortable with the quiet time and the not-always-on time. Is that a challenge as well?

Kim Potgieter

Well, because we’re not used to it. We don’t know how to be like that. Our lives on a hamster wheel are continuous, and that’s what we know. Remember, we all go to what we know. When we think about smelling the roses, actually just taking some of the stuff in and having some awe around what’s around us, it does change. Then it’s to, again, not judge ourselves. I think we’re harsh, eh? Self-compassion is not something that we’re good at. We’re judging ourselves because we’re not busy. John’s late mum is a good case in point because, if she wasn’t cleaning, she wasn’t contributing. If she wasn’t contributing, she wasn’t busy. It was all going through. Yet if she’d just taken a few minutes to sit back and clear the brain, she might have worked out what she really wanted to do with her time. That’s why many times we don’t know what brings us joy. We don’t know what we want because we give ourselves no stillness to discover that.

Michael Avery

I know a big part of your process, and you want to get me and Nicks in. We’re still going to come, still promising.

Kim Potgieter

I’m coming, I’m coming.

Michael Avery

It’s been a busy year. The sooner the better. Don’t wait. Absolutely, especially after reading Adrian’s book and his logarithmic view of time, you just realise how little time you’ve actually got left. But as we’re reaching the end of our time, I just wanted to get an insight from both of you because I think this is a conversation that is necessary, but is an evolution of a conversation that we didn’t have 10 years ago about financial planning. John, you’ve had a long association with the financial planning profession. How much has financial planning changed during that period? Has the profession genuinely moved from just selling products and constructing portfolios and using too many TLAs, these three-letter acronyms, to bamboozle people, towards genuinely helping people answer these much bigger life questions?

JOHN ARNESEN

I think, and of course my bias is the Financial Planning Institute where I was involved, there is movement in the right direction. Unfortunately, I think if somebody lives in a townhouse or in a township and has a small amount of money to save, they’re not going to get the advice from a certified financial planner. There’s still a gap there. But fortunately, more and more certified financial planners are saying it’s about the life plan. The money is part of the life plan. What’s your life plan? I do think that movement, that realisation, is coming. It wasn’t there in 2006. In 2006, it was all about your money plan. But then people like Kim came along and have changed the industry in South Africa. Kim? ‘Thank you, John. That’s a real compliment.’ The other thing is I’ve travelled a lot, especially when I was at the FPI, but after that I was still travelling quite a lot. You talk to people across the world, and there are very few people that have ever benefited from the service that Chartered Wealth gives. I know this is a bit of an advert for Chartered Wealth, but I want to make the point. This is a world-class firm that we as clients get serviced by, not just based in South Africa. Best in the world. If the rest of the world can learn from Chartered Wealth, well, that’s great. Just saying.

Kim Potgieter

I talk at a lot of industry events, so I will go around. Sometimes my colleagues say to me, ‘But Kim, why are you talking and telling all of our competitors exactly how we do everything?’ When I joined the industry 19 years ago, I joined the industry to change financial planning. I didn’t join the industry necessarily to build my own business or to do it just for our clients. That’s why I’ve written the books. That’s why I’ll speak at the FPI conference to a thousand financial planners. I share exactly what we do. I don’t leave parts out because, for me, if we can all as an industry body be doing this much better, what are we doing? We’re uplifting our country, we’re uplifting people, we all benefit. So for me, that’ll be my retirement, John. I’ll just be going around helping other financial planners.

Michael Avery

But I think, in financial planning, there can be no higher purpose than to say, let’s absolutely change the script and find a way to connect people to a higher purpose beyond the money. The money gives you choices, as we’ve spoken about. It’s an enabler. But it is never the beginning and the end of the conversation. When you talk to someone about what your dreams are, whether it’s overlanding, as you triggered with me, or helping John realise his ambitions, it’s an enabler. It gives you the space. For me, I’ve seen, and that’s pretty much the period that I’ve been in financial journalism, from 2003, so the last 23 years, I’ve seen a huge shift. Particularly, I would say, in the last seven or eight years. I don’t know if maybe COVID had some kind of accelerant on that. People have changed. People started thinking a little bit more deeply about, well, what is work if we could be so easily furloughed or dismissed, and what does it mean to be here? But there has been a big shift, and I think it’s great to see it in action. John, thank you so much for sharing your journey, and Kim, as always, for all the work that you do, really. Doff of the cap, and to Chartered Wealth. Great firm. We love talking about these things on Life Chapters, Money Choices, and I trust you’ve enjoyed this episode. Don’t forget to like, subscribe and share amongst your network.

Article for The Beacon

When Work Takes Up Less Space

A free morning can be harder to enjoy than we expect. For years, there has been somewhere to go, someone waiting for an answer, something that needs finishing. Then the demands begin to ease. The time we wanted is finally ours, but we may not yet know what to do with it.

Retirement is often planned around a financial question: will there be enough? That question matters. So do living costs, healthcare and the choices our savings will need to support. But there is another kind of preparation that deserves attention: what will make life feel worthwhile when work no longer organises our days?

John Arnesen was financially able to retire at 60. Instead, he left employment and moved into consulting. At 70, as he reduced his clients, he found himself thinking about more than spare time. What would occupy his mind? Even after years of preparation, the experience of having fewer demands felt unsettling.

Work often gives us more than an income. It provides routine, contact with others and a reason to feel needed. It also tells us what deserves our attention. When those things change, a busy social calendar may not answer every question. Having something to do is different from feeling interested and involved.

One place to begin is with a life alongside work. This does not need to be another ambitious project. It might be a friendship you make time for, an interest you return to or a way of contributing outside your profession. Small beginnings give you a chance to discover what you enjoy before your working life changes.

John finds pleasure in writing, including a book about his family, and in pickleball and community. Curiosity gives him something to think about; relationships give him somewhere to belong. His identity has room for being a husband, father, grandfather and friend. There is relief in not needing a job title to explain who you are.

For some people, reducing work gradually can offer a useful bridge. Consulting or part-time work may bring flexibility, continued contribution and income. In John’s case, consulting helped him leave much of his capital to grow. But the decision needs to fit your circumstances. Consider the income you still need, the time you want back and whether the work leaves enough room for the life you are trying to build.

The move from earning to drawing on savings can bring feelings that the numbers alone do not settle. A plan may look sound and still feel unfamiliar. Regular reviews with your financial planner can help you understand your spending, revisit assumptions and talk through concerns. Needing reassurance does not mean you have failed to prepare.

There is also no obligation to turn retirement into another job. Leave room for an unhurried walk, a conversation or a morning without a list. Stillness can help you notice what you want. If you share your life with someone, talk about how your days might change together. More time at home does not automatically mean the same hopes for that time.

A meaningful retirement does not have to arrive fully formed on your last working day. It can grow through trying, adjusting and allowing your priorities to change. Perhaps the most useful preparation is to make a little space now, not only in your diary, but in your sense of who you can be when work takes up less of your life.