A Typical Day in Early Retirement
North central Kansas sunrise
If you are considering early retirement, you might ask yourself, “What does an early retiree do all day?”
Here, we share a rundown of our typical day after over 1300 days in early retirement. As we are semi-nomadic, we have typical days at our home base and typical days while adventure-traveling.
About Us
In our late 40s, Darren and I left corporate careers in agriculture science after 20+ years each. The pandemic was a big wake-up call for us. We realized that we don’t have an endless supply of healthspan and lifespan to enjoy the fruits of our labor. We knew too many people personally who worked, worked, worked, and delayed personal and family goals for “someday.” As tomorrow is not promised, we knew we had “enough” with a couple of lifestyle changes—and the courage to leave work and a lifestyle that no longer suited us.
We left the golden handcuffs of employment in midlife to explore all the things we’ve dreamed of doing: extended travel, exploring new hobbies and business ideas, trying things outside our comfort level, renovating a 118-year-old house, improving our farmland for wildlife habitat, and spending time with friends and family.
We are semi-nomadic. We travel most of the year and maintain a small home in the Great Plains of the United States. We spend most of our travel time thru-hiking in Europe and winters in the Caribbean.
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Why Write About a Typical Day in Early Retirement?
What will I do when I retire? This is a common question for many people before they retire. However, most of the content available on this topic is targeted at traditional retirees, not early retirees like us.
Most conventional retirement content producers (aka salespeople) don’t seem to know that a growing population of people entering and in retirement identify as Retirement Rebels. These rebels are changing when retirement happens, and more importantly, what retirement means. Almost all of the early retirees we’ve met are active with various projects and/or travel.
How a retiree spends a typical day is the most important question any retiree can have. It’s the starting point for determining your retirement cost estimates and essential to answer the question, “How much money do I need for retirement?” We thought it would be helpful to share what our typical days look like.
In addition to cost estimates, knowing how you will spend a typical day will help you bridge the gap between your current work identity and the Future You. Many of us have put off learning, hobbies, family/friend/social connections, and passions while dedicating decades to employment. Additionally, it’s not uncommon for retirees to be in suboptimal health, struggling with burnout or unresolved marital or health issues at the moment of leaving the workforce. If there are health and relationship deficits in your life, don’t forget to add addressing those to a typical day activity.
Mapping out what a typical day looks like is not technically difficult. What’s more difficult is to prioritize time, considering and reflecting on “what might I do all day in retirement?”
Be prepared. This activity may be emotionally difficult to complete. You might not have anyone in your circle who is early retired. You find that you’ve been conditioned by family, society, and the workplace to live small, act in predictable ways, and not put your unique needs and dreams first.
Another challenge that may come up is that you end up with a long list of summer activities, but not many ideas for winter. This could be problematic if you reside in a northern area with a short summer. You could also run into issues if many things on your list require participation with others who may not have as much availability as you will.
Don’t worry about perfecting it your typical day. For many retirees, the first months and years are about learning and trying new things. Some activities quickly drop from a typical day when you don’t enjoy them as much as you thought. New friendships or activities will likely pop up as you shift into this new phase of life.
A Typical Day At Our Home Base
4:30 a.m. - 5:30 a.m.
We became early risers, now often waking without alarms. If one of us wakes up before the other, their “job” is to start the coffee maker so that there’s hot coffee by 5:30 a.m. By this time most days, we’ve enjoyed a cup or two of coffee and overnight oats in bed.
Coffee is very important to us. We splurge on freshly roasted beans delivered to the house or sourced locally. Getting a nice coffee set-up at home can be as simple or as luxurious as you like.
Our early morning routine is almost the same at our home base and on the road. We do find that when we are outside the US, we sleep in longer as we’ve typically been hiking or walking over 10 miles (16 km) per day.
5:30 a.m. - 7 a.m.
If it’s summer in Kansas, we’ll exercise in the mornings to beat the heat. Our go-to exercise is rucking, a great mix of low-intensity cardio and weight training.
It’s awfully cold in North Central Kansas in winter, so we often read in bed until the sun rises. We may go to our farm to check out what wildlife might be visible as the sun rises. In the winter, we see deer, fur-bearing mammals like coyotes and bobcats, bald eagles, and ducks.
If we’re thru-hiking, we usually visit other hikers over breakfast and look at the weather and route for the day. Regardless of locale, we maintain a hobby budget for gear to facilitate our activities. This includes things like good hiking shoes, good quality fitness clothing, weights, a comfortable backpack, and binoculars.
7 a.m - 8 a.m.
At our home base and on the road, If we need groceries, we stop at a local grocery store, market or deli and pick up supplies. Then, we organize ourselves to work on the project(s) of the day. When we’re in the US, projects include tiling, furniture-making, landscaping maintenance, writing, and brush clearing. When we’re thru-hiking, our project is walking 20 to 35 km to our next destination.
8 a.m. - 11:30 a.m.
Each Sunday (or rest day when thru-hiking), we sit down for an hour and discuss what projects need to be done for the week, what social activities are coming up, and what needs to be done. We’ve adapted the “marriage meeting” format from this book, which helps us to prioritize the things that each of us wants to do separately and together.
With a once-per-week meeting, we have a really good plan of what needs to be done each day. A good weekly plan has helped us eliminate most arguments and the expense of a second vehicle in the household. In these meetings, we plan our meals for the week to help keep us eating healthy. We also plan meals and snacks to avoid less healthy convenient foods.
Sometime between 9:30 AM and 10:30 AM, we’ll stop to drink water, eat some fresh fruit, and enjoy a protein snack.
11:30 a.m - 12:30 p.m
We’ll break for lunch for 30 minutes or an hour. We do a lot of batch cooking, meaning we cook meals with six, eight, or twelve servings, reducing the number of times we need to cook during the week.
At home and on the road, most of our recipes come from Skinnytaste.com or America’s Test Kitchen cookbooks. We select recipes that will taste good up to three days later, or that freeze well.
12:30 p.m. - 5 p.m.
After lunch, we’ll continue to work on projects until we break around 3:30 PM for another snack.
In the winter in the Great Plains, the warmest time is typically between 3:30 and 4:30 PM. It’s during that time we get in our exercise. Alternatively, in summer or in the Caribbean, it can be incredibly hot, so we might opt for a long swim or snorkel instead of a walk.
5 p.m. - 6 p.m.
We eat dinner pretty early when we’re at our Kansas home base. Like lunch, we cook most of our meals at home utilizing batch cooking or meal prep. At least twice per month, we go out to eat. When we’re overseas, we eat out more since it is less expensive than in the States.
We keep an eye out for special foodie events at area restaurants where we can socialize with others in our rural area who enjoy innovative cooking and a variety of cuisines.
6 p.m. - 9:30 p.m.
After dinner, we usually make our breakfast for the next day. We’ll typically have an after-dinner drink.
Since it’s after dark in the winter and very warm in the summer, this is the time we do our administrative activities like placing online orders. We spend time each evening practicing a language on Duolingo, reading, writing, or making phone calls.
We aim for a minimum of two social activities per month. This might be helping the Chamber of Commerce with a city event, a concert, a book club, or a beer or wine event. When we are thru-hiking or traveling to the Caribean, this might be every day—socializing with fellow hikers or helping with a beach cleanup or mangrove planting.
9:30 p.m. - 4:30 a.m.
When we’re at our home base, we aim for seven hours of sleep. If we’re in the Caribbean or thru-hiking, we may sleep up to nine hours. Regardless, this is significantly more sleep than we ever did in our 20+ year careers.
While we were in our careers, we often neglected our sleep health. As GenXers, we were typically raised by Baby Boomers, who viewed sleeping too much as “lazy”. Our early adulthoods were influenced by workaholic Boomers and a limited number of entertainment outlets that celebrated conspicuous consumption (like yachts and fast cars). Sometime around 2010, conspicuous consumption was replaced by “busyness” as a status symbol, likely because it’s easier to brag on social media about being busy than, let’s say, sharing the purchase of a Rolex watch.
Now we know from sleep experts that sleeping more can help maintain a healthier weight, reduce stress, enable better moods, and help us feel like we have more energy each day. Not getting enough sleep can increase one’s risk for accidents, illnesses, and even cancer. To learn more about the large volume of research on sleep that’s happened in the past 20 years, check out this podcast on sleep or a book by sleep researcher Matthew Walker, Ph.D.
If you’re closing in on retirement or across the finish line, consider what cultural influences like conspicuous consumption and displays of busyness might be influencing your typical day in retirement. Be aware that conspicuous displays of busyness are not universal status symbols. Travel has opened our eyes to the fact that conspicuous busyness is mostly an American phenomenon and hopefully a temporary trend.
Above: Foodie finds in Hoxie, Kansas. Pollinator species project. Old house renovation project.
In Conclusion
When constructing our “typical day” in early retirement, we don’t fit many of society’s expectations of retirees. Present on our list is personal growth, maintaining a modest level of wealth to fund our lifestyle, adventure, simplicity, vitality, and curiosity. Absent from our list are watching TV, caring for pets, working a part-time job, taking shopping trips, gambling, hours surfing the internet, watching grandkids, doing arts and crafts, baking sugary treats, and a bucket list of fast travel on luxury tours.
We’re not being critical of these activities. We’re simply trying to point out that a typical retirement day should include activities and projects aligned with your values and budget.
While the personal finance space may try to convince you that you need a certain amount of money based on what you earned in your working years, know that that’s often not the case. We know of retirees with modest means who aspire to travel and spend on children and grandchildren significantly outside their means. Alternatively, we know executives who had high-flying careers where it’s expected that their post-career day “should” be crammed with consulting and serving on prestigious boards, whose main enjoyment in early retirement is walking their dog and back-country camping a few weeks a year, which require very little capital outlay.
The real aim should be a financial figure that covers funded contentment—having enough money to fund a lifestyle that’s in alignment with your personal values and dreams, not someone else's.
