Rick Guetter, a retired high school teacher and IT business owner in Guelph, Ont., says it's important to reinvent yourself after leaving full-time employment.Nick Iwanyshyn/The Globe and Mail
In Tales from the Golden Age, retirees talk about their spending, savings and whether life after work is what they expected. For more articles in this series, click here.
Rick Guetter, 63, Guelph, Ont.
I retired in early December, 2023, at the age of 60, after a career that included 25 years working as a high school teacher and the final 12 years as a business owner. My business partner and I sold our IT services company. We both wanted more time for family, hobbies and a slower pace of life. My wife retired a couple of years before me, but after a year, she decided to return to work as a middle school teacher. She missed the structure of colleagues and work.
For the first three months of retirement, I tried to do as little as possible. I needed to wallow in the lack of structure of retirement without worrying about how to fill my time. December was spent getting ready for Christmas, and then my wife and I took our children to Mexico for a family vacation in January.
After we got back, I took some further time to reflect and then decided to start consulting educators on how to navigate artificial intelligence (AI), helping them avoid the same mistakes many schools made by not planning for the impact of social media.
I write a weekly blog, run workshops for teachers and parents, and recently started working directly with students on adopting the skills and tools to succeed in the AI age. My consulting takes up a couple of days a week, and most of it I do for free as a way to give back to the community.
My retirement is also spent working out at the local YMCA, playing pickleball, meeting friends for coffee, and reading. My wife and I also have a cottage in Wiarton, Ont., about two hours north of Guelph, where I spent a lot of time year-round, including on my own when she’s working. There’s always a list of things to do, and I can tackle it on my terms, rather than on a forced schedule.
I do worry about money in retirement, even though we have enough with our pensions, the sale of my business and other investments. We have a great financial advisor who tells us how much we can spend each year.
Still, it’s hard for me because I’m not used to spending. I’m used to decades of saving. Our advisor recommended considering the years from 60 to 75 as “go-go” years, 75 to 85 as “slow-go” years, and 85+ as “no-go” years, and allocating our retirement income to match the activity level we plan for. It’s good advice, based on how I see others living their retirement years.
Retirement has been more challenging than I expected. There are 40 to 50 additional hours to fill each week, and hobbies and housework only take up a fraction of that time. And while you may have really big retirement plans, most of us are creatures of habit; the way we spend our time and money during our working years will likely carry forward into retirement.
I’ve learned that once you leave full-time employment, you can become pretty irrelevant in the work world unless you reinvent yourself, which I’ve tried to do. I’ve also learned the importance of community, both your existing one and creating new ones, to help make life more fulfilling.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
Are you a Canadian retiree interested in discussing what life is like now that you’ve stopped working? The Globe is seeking participants for its Tales from the Golden Age feature, which examines the personal and financial realities of retirement. If you’re interested in being interviewed for this feature and agree to use your full name and have a photo taken, please e-mail us at: goldenageglobe@gmail.com. Please include a few details about how you saved and invested for retirement and what your life is like now.