Navigating a decoupled retirement can be a little…

Transcript

I've mentioned in past videos that Amy and I have what I call a decoupled retirement, meaning I'm retired but she continues to work. And she's going to work as long as it's still fun for her, is the idea. She doesn't feel like she's in any great hurry to leave work, so she wants to keep doing it, you know, as long as she continues to enjoy it. And for the first, I'd say, six months of my retirement, I was kind of living it like, it was like I was waiting for her to retire. You know, I just kept thinking, you know, once we're both retired, we're going to do this. And once we're both retired, we're going to do that. And for one thing, that puts an unreasonable pressure on her to retire because, like, I'm holding up my plans for her to do something, which isn't really fair. And secondly, it was kind of hindering my retirement because I was kind of living it like, you know, I'm going to do this. There was a lot of things I wasn't doing because I thought, well, I'll do those things once we're both retired. And I eventually realized what you have to do is you have to look at your retirement in stages. So the stage I'm in right now is the I'm retired and she isn't, or the decoupled stage. Once we're both retired, that'll be a new stage, and we'll do things differently then. But I've arrived at a couple of sort of policies for my retirement while we're in the decoupled stage. Right? I'll do a few videos on those. But the most important thing is first realizing that you don't have to put your retirement on hold just because your spouse isn't quite ready to retire yet.