When you calculate how many working-year weekends…

Transcript

So I was reading another retirement book the other day, and they were talking about the countdown. You know, you should determine how many days you have left, and then that'll help you to sort of understand the value of each of those days and make the most of them. And I've talked about this in other posts, and the myth of making the most out of every day probably ruins more retirement than almost anything else. So I want to walk through why those death clocks or retirement countdowns are sort of silly when you think about how much time you actually have left in retirement. So most of us work from, let's say, age 20 to 65. That's 45 years. There are 104 weekend days in a year. That means before we retired, we had... We had about 4,680 weekend days to enjoy. Now let's count how many weekend days we have to enjoy after we retire. So let's assume a person retires at 65, and they live to be 85, being conservative. That's 20 years. In retirement, we have 365 weekend days in every year. That means we have 7,380. That means we have 300 weekend days during our retirement. So if we were to extrapolate these weekend days out and look at what it would take in working years to have that many weekend days, it would take 70 working years. The equivalent of 70 years of having two weekend days a week. And I think that's the thing that helps. And I think that's the thing that helps me the most as far as like not trying to wring every moment out of my retirement. I realized I have almost twice as much time after I retire as I did before I retire. When it comes to days per week that I can just relax and not be fretting over whether or not I'm getting something done or progressing on something or whatever. So just keep in mind, after retirement, you get 365 weekend days. Those are a lot. And you don't have to wring every moment out of every day.