Try a Mini-Retirement

At the end of 2022, a good friend of ours completed through-hiking the Appalachian Trail. While doing so, he heard people talk about the Camino de Santiago in Spain. Knowing how much my wife and I like walking and that I had always been somewhat interested in a long-distance hike, he shared what he knew—specifically that you could sleep in a bed every night. I wasn’t super interested in the tent life of the AT, but walking 500 miles and having access to cafes and cities and decent beds? My wife and I started planning our trip to take place in April-May 2024.

We began studying Spanish, getting our gear in order, doing shakedown hikes (going 12-15 miles with our gear to replicate a day on the Camino), researching our route, booking accommodations and transportation, attending Mass in Spanish, and reading others’ accounts of their experience. When we do something new, we research and plan the heck out of it so we are well prepared. We scheduled six weeks for the whole trip, which was quite generous—a lot of people do it in four weeks. We scheduled plenty of “zero days” when we would stay two nights in a city like Pamplona, and we made sure not to do very long days for the first week or so. Our arrival and getting to the start of the Via Frances, St. Jean Pied-de-Port, went perfectly.

We hit the Camino!

Despite a few difficult days (the grueling climb over the Pyrenees in fog, rain, and cold, and the treacherous descent into Zubiri), things went basically fine. We loved Spanish food, wine, and culture, and we enjoyed the little towns, cities, and the people. We loved the sense of community on the Camino. Our Spanish rapidly improved. We generally liked the walking, although after two weeks of averaging 11 miles per day, our feet were starting to suffer.

However, no one had mentioned the unending wind. We were constantly walking into it, hour after hour, day after day. It was slowly driving me mad. Although we had time to talk to each other and listen to audiobooks, there was also a lot of boredom. We started to realize our days were a happiness level of 6/10. Back home, they’re a steady 8-9/10. We weren’t having the transformative experience that many others describe. After three weeks, we called it and left for home after hitting Burgos, about 170 miles in (out of about 500).

This left us with a bit of a dilemma. We had completely cleared our schedules for the next three weeks, because we were supposed to be in Spain. We could have gone back to work, but we didn’t have any major responsibilities at that time. We knew we were getting close to early retirement, so we decided to do a solid week of retirement practice at home.

Practicing an Early Retirement 

Since we’ve been intentionally planning for retirement for several years, we had a pretty good idea of what our daily and weekly retirement life schedule would be. A typical day would start with coffee and hanging out with the cats until about 10am, when we would go for an hour-long walk around the neighborhood. After the walk, we would do yoga together and then have a light lunch. The early afternoon would be for embroidery for my wife and writing or editing videos or other hobby work for me. Then, we would go for another hour-long walk in the mid-afternoon.

Around 5pm, we would do social time with friends (usually via video) or martial arts. We would have dinner, watch a show or two, go for our evening 20-minute digestion walk, and settle into bed to read for a bit. A typical week would include a date night, a longer walk (3-4 hours), weightlifting, making a fun/time-consuming dinner, and 2-4 role-playing game sessions with our friends online.

Since we had this completely free week, we decided to execute the plan. We spent the first few days after coming back from Spain cleaning and saying “hi” to the cats and otherwise getting all the post-travel work done. On Monday of our retirement week, we started our schedule. And it went . . .  perfectly. We did everything almost exactly as we had intended. It was so incredibly relaxing, not having any work responsibilities and not having the stress of travel. We didn’t just do a staycation, which we’ve done before for retirement practice. We did a proper week off.

This week was better than a staycation because we had no work responsibilities at all—no emails to answer, no papers to be written, nothing. The semester was over, so there were fewer people around. We felt like we lived on our own little island, which we could sometimes leave if we wanted. We kept up with regular household chores, but those are such an integral part of our lives that we didn’t even realize it at the time. We didn’t keep to a strict schedule, but more of a “well, I’m done with this, I think I’ll go on to something else” sort of plan. Having structure with some flexibility was a good way to go for us.

At the end of the week, we felt refreshed, revitalized, and relaxed. We had a very intentional week—different than a lazy week—and we felt good about it.

More information here:

Lessons Learned from Achieving Financial Independence

Retirement Income Strategies — And Here’s Our Plan for When We FIRE

Does Retirement Practice Make Perfect? 

That week’s experience confirmed our intentions to retire 10 months later. I understand that retirement won’t always be so blissful and that there are different phases of retirement. Generally, they are the honeymoon phase, disenchantment, reorientation, and stability. I imagine most retirement practice runs will highlight the honeymoon phase, where you’re just happy to not have to go to work every day. I’m sure we’ll have moments in retirement when we are bored or wish we hadn’t retired. But I think having a plan for how to spend time and then practicing that plan are important steps.

We have activities we want to do each day, each week, each month, and each year that help keep us focused and to not while away the time. We’ve developed these over the past three years of discussion, doing some staycation weeks, and imagining our life in retirement. My daily activities include walking ≥ one hour, doing something creative, reading, and feeling rested. My weekly activities include martial arts, social time, date night, a longer walk, weightlifting, making a fun dinner, doing role-playing games, and spending quality time with my wife. My monthly activities include traveling to see friends. My yearly activities include taking an adventure trip with my wife, hosting large events, and doing a locum. If I hit each of these during the designated time frame, I think I will be pretty content.

If you are close to retirement or just dreaming of it, try a practice run (or, in my case, a whole lot of practice walks). See how it feels. If you’re bored or lonely, you may need to spend more effort planning your retirement life. Do at least a week when you have no work-related responsibilities. We only took the one week out of the three we could have taken because we were on leave-without-pay and wanted to minimize the loss of income and because we knew we would be hitting full retirement some time soon.

If you can do it longer, all the better. Although you never really know the reality of retirement until you experience it, doing a trial week can help you decide if you’re actually ready to take that walk.

Have you practiced retirement? How long did it last? How did it go? Do you feel more confident that you'll be ready to retire when the time comes?