By Neal Templin

After 15 years in the magazine publishing business, Tim Neher was considering calling it quits earlier this year. But retirement worried him. "I felt it was time -- but it's kind of scary in this world of inflation to maybe cut it off 100%," he said. His other fear was whether he would stay "mentally sharp" without working.

So, in March, Neher cut his workload sharply. The 66-year-old remains the art director for a biannual magazine on outdoor adventures. That keeps him busy for four months a year. In the other eight months, he pursues his passions: fishing and the outdoors. It's going so well that he no longer worries about the day when he stops working completely.

Going from full-time work to full-time retirement is a leap. "The job, the career, becomes someone's identity," says Neher's financial advisor, Tim Doehrmann of Peoria, Ill. "If they have 40 or 50 years of that identity and all of a sudden they're trying to have a cocktail at the country club or hang out with friends, it's a change."

Some experts recommend that workers start practicing by doing retirement activities while they are still employed. That might mean getting involved with a charity or scheduling a "staycation" at home, where you fill up your calendar without leaving town. Go out to lunch with friends. Go to the gym. Go on that bike ride around the neighborhood. Give yourself a better idea of what it will be like to no longer have a 9-to-5 to keep you occupied.

In a video, Stan Humphries, a financial advisor in Winnipeg, Canada, advises workers within five years of retirement to create a "retirement day" each week or month where they pretend they are retired. "Don't wait until you retire to begin living some of your retirement lifestyle," he advises.

With retirement role-playing, he says, "You'll learn a lot from that. And you might have to do some course correction or some preplanning that's going to come out of your experience of practicing retirement."

Andrew Feldman, a financial advisor in the Chicago area, says it's important to retain a sense of purpose in retirement. But he adds, "You don't have to accomplish a task every day."

You can practice retirement without actually doing the activity. That's the case with Judy Cohn, one of Feldman's clients, who has been thinking a lot about the different things she wants to do when she retires. She just gave notice to the investment bank where she works as a research librarian.

"I'm 57, so I feel a little young to retire," she says. "So, I call it, 'I'm not going to work. I quit my job. I'm done.' "

Cohn wants to do all of the things in retirement that she couldn't do while working for a bank. That means wearing bright clothes instead of cladding herself in staid business casual. It means getting involved in political protests.

"We don't have performance reviews in retirement, so there is no one judging us," she says. "We kind of live our lives for ourselves."

She continues: "So, suddenly it's like, what side of ourselves have we been squashing or bottling up because it didn't fit with your lifestyle as a worker."

Some people don't practice at all for retirement, and it still goes just fine. Darin Richards, another of Doehrmann's clients, had planned to retire early for decades. When his wife, Hollie, had a health scare last year, they decided to pull the trigger and stopped working earlier this year.

He and his wife didn't practice retirement. Their days in it have been filled with hanging out with friends and with each other. They went on a cruise with neighbors in January and another one in September. He goes on regular runs and says he may learn a foreign language.

"We were confident that any gaps we'd have [in retirement] would be filled up with things we already like to do, or we'd find something new, " he says.

Write to Neal Templin at neal.templin@barrons.com

This content was created by Barron's, which is operated by Dow Jones & Co. Barron's is published independently from Dow Jones Newswires and The Wall Street Journal.

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September 18, 2025 03:30 ET (07:30 GMT)

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