My mum was smart about it. For weeks before my first day of school, she built it up. This place called school, she said, you’re going to love it. So I skipped off that first morning without a backward glance.
Second day was a different story. Mum said it was time for school again. I said, “what, again?” She said yes, every day. I asked how long for. And that’s when she made the mistake of answering honestly.
School till you’re sixteen, she said. Then work till you’re sixty. Then retirement.
I was five years old, being told my whole life was already planned out. School till sixteen. Work till sixty. I hadn’t agreed to any of it, hadn’t even been consulted. Then came the last word. Retirement. That one felt different. That one felt like it was actually mine.
It represented freedom.
That thought never really left me. Then in my thirties, I met Rick and Heather. They weren’t waiting for retirement to arrive and figuring it out from there, they were designing it years ahead of time. Where they’d live. What they’d do as their bodies aged. Who they wanted around them once work stopped handing them a ready-made community every day. They ended up building a life with four other friends on a property on the NSW coast, a real home and wildlife sanctuary they created together, instead of leaving it to chance or wherever a random retirement village had a bed free. Heather wrote a book about it, Shedders. It’s one of the best examples I’ve seen of someone doing retirement on purpose instead of by accident.
That’s when I really started noticing how differently most people approached it. I’ve spent a lot of my adult life half-watching how people talk about retirement, and I noticed something odd. Most of the conversation is about money. How much you’ll need. Whether your super will last.
Money matters, of course it does. But nobody was asking the other question. What are you actually retiring into?
I watched people I knew work incredibly hard toward retirement, and then arrive there without a plan for what came next. Some found their footing quickly. Others didn’t, and it showed. Not because they hadn’t saved enough. Because nobody had asked them what a Tuesday in retirement would look like.
Over the years I started collecting things. Ideas from conversations, questions I wished someone had asked me sooner, small observations about the people who seemed to be genuinely thriving in this stage of life versus the ones who were just filling time. Rick and Heather were the first real proof it could be different. I didn’t set out to build anything from it. I just couldn’t stop paying attention.
Eventually I realised a good retirement doesn’t happen by accident. It comes from designing it, on purpose, the same way you’d design anything else you cared about.
These days I’m living out my own version of that. My husband John and I are travelling Australia full time in our caravan, and this website is one of the things I’ve chosen to build alongside that. Not because retirement needs filling with busywork, but because I wanted a project of my own. Something with purpose. Something to give back.
That’s the whole reason Retiring Gracefully exists. Not to tell you what your retirement should look like. I don’t know your life, your relationships, your health, the things that light you up.
I’m here to help you ask better questions, so you can discover what a great retirement looks like, for you.
If that sounds like something you’ve been curious about, I’m glad you found your way here.