I've worked with a lot of people who have retired successfully.

No debt, plenty of money, social security dialed in, and they were completely unhappy.

Not because they ran out of money, but because retirement solved the financial problem, but did nothing to address a life problem.

And the reason for this is pretty simple.

Retirement software, planning software can really only answer one question.

That question is,

are you prepared to retire? Do you have a high enough probability of success to make the financial side of retirement work? And that is necessary. That's only half the picture. Because

while that projection will show you if you can retire, it will never ask you, what are you retiring

into? So why does this happen? Well, it happens because for decades, what are you retiring into? So why does this happen?

Well, it happens because for decades, we are trained, either consciously or subconsciously,

to focus on the finish line, to focus on the numbers, to focus on saving, to focus on

the thing that is very easy to quantify.

And that thing is your retirement readiness.

But the problem with this is we make the naive assumption

that once work ends, life just fills in and everything is good to go. Here's what we don't realize,

though. Work quietly gives us those things we don't realize that we need. The structure, the relationships,

the purpose, even when you don't fully love what you're doing for work, there's at least this sense

of the things

that we all need are being checked off in some way. That's not to say there's not a better way to do it.

That's not to say you can't do these things in retirement, but what it is to say is if all we do

is folks on the finish line and the numbers and the finances, we might be completely set up

financially, but I have a horrible retirement.

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