Essay · 7 min read
Why You Should Practice Retirement Before Retiring
You'd never buy a house sight unseen. Yet most people buy a decade of their life that way.
By Ryan Scott
Retirement is the largest untested purchase of a human life. Thirty years, bought in one transaction, based on a fantasy assembled from advertising and exhaustion.
The fix is not more planning. Planning is what got you here. The fix is rehearsal: short, cheap, reversible experiments that produce evidence instead of confidence.
Rent in the town before you sell the house. Take the two-week version of the sabbatical before you take the twenty-year version. Volunteer for the cause for a month before you build an identity on it.
Rehearsals are unglamorous and they save people from very expensive mistakes. The couple who discovers in month two that they cannot actually stand being together for fourteen unstructured hours a day has learned something worth far more than another point of portfolio return.
Every experiment ends in one of three ways: keep, adjust, or discard. All three are wins. The only losing move is arriving at 66 with an untested theory and no time left to revise it.
Where do you actually stand?
The free Retirement Reality Check scores all five categories and names your primary risk.