The part nobody warns you about
What actually happens after you hit your number
Every other page on this site helps you work out the number. This one is about the thing the number was never going to fix — and it is not the thing most people brace for.
In one industry survey, 17% of people not yet retired expected to miss the people they work with most, and 34% of retirees said they miss them most: about double. That is the gap this page is about: not a loss of purpose, but a loss of colleagues.
17%
of people not yet retired expected the social side to be what they would miss most
34%
of retirees said it is what they miss most — roughly double
What people expected to miss most, against what retirees miss most
Set side by side, the social line is the largest gap in the table: 17% of people not yet retired expected to miss the people most, and 34% of retirees do. Income went the other way (38% against 29%), and purpose and mental stimulation differed by three points or less. One survey, with the limits below.
People not yet retired: what they expect to miss most
Retirees: what they miss most
The people you worked with
A reliable income
A sense of purpose
Mental stimulation
Merrill Lynch / Age Wave, 2013, more than 6,300 people aged 45+, most findings from 3,002 general-population responses, with an oversample of 3,005 affluent respondents ($250,000 to $3 million in investable assets) included. A second survey found the same shape: Edward Jones / Age Wave (Canadian retirees) reports 39% name “the people and social stimulation” as what they miss most about work, against 22% who name the paycheck. Both are industry-funded and neither is peer-reviewed — see the note on that below.
The fear is real. The outcome is mostly reassuring.
The best-matched evidence we could find is a UBS survey of wealthy investors, some not yet retired and some retired — the closest available stand-in for someone hitting a FIRE number, even though it isn't the same thing. The fears below are the not-yet-retired investors'; the experience below is the retirees'. The two groups are different people, not one group followed over time.
Going in — what not-yet-retired investors feared
- 36% of not-yet-retired investors were worried about losing their sense of purpose.
- 64% of not-yet-retired investors expected to miss their work schedule more than their salary.
Coming out — what retired investors report
- 50% of retired investors needed no time at all to adjust (UBS says “half”).
- 84% of retired investors said they were happier than at any point in their lives.
UBS Investor Watch, 2017, 2,028 investors with $1m or more, retired and not yet retired (UBS is a wealth manager, and published it). The one solid figure that points the other way: in a separate Edward Jones / Age Wave survey, 33% of retirees said they struggled to find a sense of purpose (Canadian edition), a real minority. Worth holding onto: in that same survey, “being financially wealthy” was the lowest of the sources of purpose listed, at 15%, behind time with loved ones, being true to yourself and simply doing something you enjoy.
The honest part: nobody has actually studied people like you
The figures above describe people aged 45 and over (Merrill), Canadian retirees (Edward Jones) and investors with $1m or more (UBS), mostly at a normal retirement age. Not one study we could find follows someone who stopped working in their thirties or forties by choice, in good health, with a portfolio behind them. That population — the actual FIRE case — is simply unmeasured.
So take the reassuring numbers and the cautionary one in the same spirit: as the closest evidence that exists, not as proof of what your version will feel like. The truthful headline is that this is a gap in what anyone knows — and a gap is not the same as a warning. There is no evidence that people who reach financial independence early are adrift. There is just an absence of anyone having looked.
One more caution worth stating plainly. Almost all of the comforting research here is published by firms that sell wealth management and retirement products. That doesn't make it wrong, but nobody in that business has much reason to publish the gloomier finding — so treat the reassurance as real but discounted, and don't read the silence on early retirees as proof of anything either way.
What to do with all this
If there is one practical thing to take from it, it's this: plan for the social side, not just the spreadsheet.
The number is the easy part — you can calculate it in a minute on any page here. The part people underprepare for is the ordinary daily contact that a job quietly provides and that stops the day you do. It's worth deciding, before you leave, where the people in your week are going to come from afterwards. That's not financial advice and it isn't a product — it's just the thing the research keeps pointing at, and the one the calculators can't help with.
How we decide what's solid enough to put on this page, and the widely-repeated claims we checked and refused to use, are set out in how we source this.