In this Episode of the Secure Your Retirement Podcast, Radon and Murs discuss what life after retirement looks like with longtime client Jerry Coats. Jerry spent his career in engineering and risk management at GlaxoSmithKline, and he and his wife Gardenia have been retired for about two and a half years. He shares the savings habits they set when they first married, how they knew when the time was right to walk away from two successful careers, and why the biggest adjustment had more to do with filling their days than with the money. 

Listen in to learn about the money routine Jerry and Gardenia built in their first six months of retirement, what Jerry calls “scope creep,” and the guiding principles they use to shape what they call chapter three. 

In this episode, find out: 

• The three savings rules Jerry and Gardenia set early in their marriage and kept for decades. 

• Why defining what retirement looks like for you comes before deciding whether you have enough. 

• How scope creep, the “one more year” trap, can cost you time you can’t get back. 

• The monthly, quarterly, and annual meetings that keep both spouses on the same page about their finances. 

• What surprised Jerry most about retirement, and his advice for anyone five years out. 

Tweetable quotes: 

“You have to define what retirement looks like for you.” Jerry Coats 

“Once you set your goal and you’ve crystallized what you want it to look like, you’ve hit the mark in terms of the numbers, go with it.” Jerry Coats 

Resources: 

If you are in or nearing retirement and you want to gain clarity on what questions you should be asking, learn what the biggest retirement myths are, and identify what you can do to achieve peace of mind for your retirement, get started today by requesting our complimentary phone conversation with Secure Your Retirement! 

Here’s the full transcript:

Jerry, thank you so much for coming in and chatting with Murs and myself today. Yeah, we, you know, we came up with this idea about living your best retirement. And so Murs and I can sit around all day long and just tell stories about clients and what they went through from our perspective. But we thought, man, would it be nice to have clients who actually have lived this idea of after working all these years, coming in and talking about what it was like to move into retirement, maybe some of the anxieties, and hear it right from you. And we’ve kind of been talking about this a little bit with our whole staff as well as with clients. I think it’s going to be really, really helpful for people. So again, thank you. 

But just to kind of get us a little bit of background, if you don’t mind, Jerry, could you kind of tell us about maybe where you’re from, like what part of the world you’re from as far as, and then kind of maybe a little bit of background about what you did for work and your family? 

Okay. All right. So my family is originally from South Carolina, but we’re part of that, you know, the Great Migration North, and my parents moved up to Pennsylvania, specifically Philadelphia. That’s where I grew up. Went to school in Pittsburgh, went to college in Pittsburgh, and then found our way down here in North Carolina. 

We’ve been here, gosh, is it 37? 37, 38 years that we’ve been here. So I would consider ourselves North Carolinians at this point. I mean, plus being from South Carolina, I mean, it was somewhat familiar. But I know growing up, of course, in the North, in Philly, was very different, you know, city life compared to coming down here in Mayberry. As you said, you know, we were deciding to move down here. You’re going down where? Right? But it has just been a tremendous move for us. 

It was one of the best decisions that we made in a number of ways. We, you know, now when we look back at it, you know, we always tell our family and friends, you know, in your life, you’re going to make a couple of two, three key decisions that really form and shape your life. And we can point to that decision to actually come down here as one. Another, it’s just been great raising the family. 

Gordie and I got married, you know, pretty early after college. We have two grown kids. They’re doing well. Our son is in Durham. Our daughter lives in Atlanta with two. We have two grandkids, five and eight. 

Oh, wow. 

And they think they’re grown. Yeah. You know, so in retirement, they keep us busy. You know, we spend a lot of time now just focusing on a lot of those activities and things like family and friends and travel, as we’ll get into, couldn’t do those when we were committed to our careers and working all those years. So it’s just been a great time, I think, being here in North Carolina. 

Yeah. So tell us a little bit about your and Gardenia’s careers, and then we’ll kind of talk about this whole transition into a retirement mindset. 

Okay, so I worked most down here. I was working in the pharmaceutical industry. That’s what brought me here. Worked with Glaxo, and originally that was the legacy company, and then that turned into Glaxo Wellcome, and then turned into GlaxoSmithKline. Part of my career was I was involved pretty heavily in helping a company make those transitions to the new companies. 

My background is in engineering. So I would say the first half of my career, I worked in engineering, but somehow I made this transition to risk management. And what I did was build, I mean, the biggest part of that was building computer systems that generated data and information that helped us manage and mitigate risk at our facilities around the world. You know, so, I mean, that was just fantastic. 

Guardia was in tech, you know. She traveled a lot. She was building systems. You probably used some of the products that she built. The voice systems, like when you call some of the big boxes to get your prescriptions and things like that, and the automated system will come on and tell you, okay, what’s your prescription number and all that sort of stuff. Well, the company she was working for built those systems that a lot of the big boxes in this area and elsewhere use. 

Yeah, like Walmart, the Kmarts, the Harris Teeters, the Targets, and all of that. So she was, you know, hustling, you know, every day. That’s like what we used to say to each other before we went out. Every day we’re hustling, going out there, you know, hitting it. So, you know, over those years, and then you mix that in with, you know, raising the kids, moving around. It was a grind, of course, but it was enjoyable. 

We are very grateful for the careers that we’ve had with our respective companies. 

Excellent. Let’s talk a little bit. When I’m talking to people in a group or when I’m talking to somebody who’s not retired yet, I say, you go for decades, going to work, making money, saving money, and you get down to this phase of life. Most people start probably thinking somewhat serious about retirement maybe about five years out. They get real serious two or three years out. And then it’s like, okay, going to pull the plug. 

And I always talk about it as an emotional roller coaster to think about this idea that, have I been able to save enough that I can make it? Could you just, you know, for somebody listening that maybe is in that phase right there, would you mind sharing maybe some of the anxieties that you and Gardenia had when you were thinking about this idea of, like, retirement? 

Well, it’s interesting because I think for us, we have those anxieties. What is it going to be like? You don’t have that, what we used to call that, that two-week hit coming in. What would that be? Sure, we thought about that. But I think for us, the difference was, you know, when I think about this, is that we thought about this a long time ago. 

Yeah. 

I mean, almost from the beginning, the way we actually set out, we began saving right away when we got married, aggressively. You know, I remember one of my mentors saying to me, I said to him, you know, I’m getting my job. I said, I’m going to save half of my money. And he looked at me and said, you’re not going to do that. And I was shocked. And he laid it out to me in terms of what it’s like, what the obligations are, what you’re going to be faced with, what it takes to live, you know, that sort of thing. 

You know, you kind of know that. But, you know, I was at the point where, you know, we just grew up, you know, just regular folk in Philly. And what I wanted to do is do better, you know. I mean, I wanted to take that next step. So I was, we were very aggressive in it. And so we had, say, three objectives, you know. 

When we saved, we said we’re not going to touch our savings ever. We’re just going to let it ride. We’re going to live below our means, you see. And then the third thing is we said we weren’t going to, uh, carry to the—I think we did a pretty good job with this, but we said we weren’t going to carry consumer debt, you see. And I think we did that. I think we hit those marks, and we let it ride. 

So when we get to that point, right, where we’re five and ten years out, we could see that from a financial standpoint, we were going to hit the marks as we defined retirement, you know. I mean, and that’s another thing. You have to define what retirement looks like for you. 

Yeah. 

And for us, it was more of what you point out, the psychological part, you know, just making that transition. So if you’re not working and you’re not committed to your meetings and your calls and your travel and all that kind of stuff, what are you committed to, right? You know, so for us, it was more about, uh, understanding what was going to fill that void, you see. 

And so what we were doing at that time, the anxiety was real around, okay, how do we fill our day? What is our day going to look like? What are we going to do? You know, and so the time was spent doing that. So it was a little different sort of transition, transition. We weren’t so bent out of shape about the financial part, right, you see. And, but that, it is a big deal, you know. 

You have to make sure that, you know, when you get up in the morning and you don’t have to, you know, you don’t have to get in a car. You don’t have to sign on. You don’t have to check in. You don’t have to do all of that stuff. You know, what am I doing? 

Yeah. 

You know, so for us, it was sitting around and doing that. And I think we’ve done, I think, a pretty good job of making that transition. You know, we can get into that. 

Yeah, as we go through this. Yeah, yeah. So I think, I think that’s great. You started as pretty much, it sounds like, as soon as you got your first jobs. 

Yeah. 

It was more forward-looking to, we need to be diligent about retirement. 

Yep. 

Right. And, and setting those good habits from the beginning often leads to success. But then you get to this, this place where a lot of times, I say people are checking the boxes, right? I’m saving into my 401(k). I’ve got my emergency fund set up. Oh, now we’ve got kids, so we’ve got to take care of the kids and think about their college planning. So you’re checking all the boxes. And a lot of times, you get on autopilot for a little bit. 

And so at some point, there had to have been some mindset shift of, hey, Gardenia, when do we want to actually retire? Financially, we’re there, but, you know, was there a transitioning moment in maybe your careers where you just didn’t want to do it anymore, or, or you hit an age and that was like the target age? How did you make the decision to start thinking about, well, financially, we’re on pace for it, but what is the right time? How did you get there? 

Yeah, I think it was, we didn’t, we didn’t want to work too late. You know, I don’t think we wanted to retire too early. We had good careers. I was working in a position that I enjoyed. I mean, it was like we were tinkering with computers. I felt like I was on the front edge of the AI, building computers. When I left, actually, we were getting into the LLM stuff and getting into the predictive side of these risk models. 

I had made contact with the folks over at Oxford, you know, and I’m like, gosh, we’re working with these guys talking about this. So it was fun. You know, so for me, it was almost like leaving at the height of that. You know, my work was good. I had become somewhat known around the industry, giving talks around the country and different parts of the world, working with the FDA. And, you know, I had actually become a fellow, you know, so my work was good. 

You know, I sort of, as I said, I want to walk out on top. 

Yeah. 

So I kind of was able to do that. But then, you know, in doing that, you get to the point and you say, okay, so wait a minute. You do look at your age. You do look at the fact that you are multifaceted. You know, we have a lot of interests as well. That was a good run, you know, a good chapter. 

Cordelia, the same thing. She was in tech in her field. They were doing some things, building some different products, moving in some different areas of their business. And she felt the time was right, you know, okay, where she can kind of go out on top. She finished a couple years before I did, you know, but the time was right for her. And I said, okay, I’m going to, you know, get to a certain point here and finish up at GSK, and the time was right. 

So, like I said, we were very grateful. I mean, we weren’t in positions where we got caught up in something or, you know, like a layoff and all of that kind of, you know, stuff. You know, we didn’t get caught up into that. We were, I think, both well-respected in our respective industries and careers. And, you know, we were just able to kind of go out, you know, when we felt the time actually was, was right, you know. Um, yeah, I think, I think that’s it. 

Yeah, I think that says it. Yeah, good. So let’s kind of think about that. Go back in your mind a little bit to those first, uh, you talked about that, like, what are we going to do kind of thing. But go back into that, like, say, let’s go into the first few weeks, even maybe the first year, right, of retirement. What did y’all come up with that you said, okay, we’re going to do? Because now it’s like, well, I’m not on vacation. I’m retired. 

I’m not tired. 

Yeah, well, so you’re retired, and, and you’re right. So is there, uh, some anxiety, some thinking about, okay, wait a minute, this is different? You know, what is the most important thing? And so for us, of course, the most important thing is making sure your financial house is in good order. You know, so what are we going to do with our time? 

So as you know, when you’re working in your careers, what you really get used to, and we all get used to that, is that routine. You have that routine that you know you’re going to hit every day. So in retirement, I think what happens is people, they kind of lose sight of the routine. They don’t have a routine, and sometimes you get off course from that. And that’s where people say, I got to go back to work. 

I was just talking to one of my other friends the other day, and they said, look, I’m going back to work. I’m like, what? 

So for us, we said, look, we know what we want. We want to travel. We have a good social network, but primarily we need to make sure our financial house is in order. So one of the things that we would do is, in addition to the professional help that we would get, we said, look, we’re the captains of our ship. You know what I mean? We need to know better than anybody what’s going on. 

So using the skill sets that we learned over the years in our careers, we said, hey, look, what’s your calendar look like? Let’s put something on the calendar where we can come together and talk about what’s going on. 

Now, we divided that up. So we would have like a monthly meeting set up on the calendar where we would just do budgets, stuff, you know, just budget, you know, what’s happening, what does it need to be? On a quarterly basis, we would do it in what we call a top-to-bottom, you know, end-to-end, where we would look at all of the accounts. Um, we were, you know, and I had my own spreadsheet together, of course, you know, and, and so we would pull everything together, go top to bottom, and then we would say, okay, where are some gaps? You know, is there something we want to do? 

We would generate action items for each other and divide them up, put dates on them. You got to come, you got to go do this and do that. And that we put together pretty quickly within the first three to six months. And what we found is, we said, and we would share that sort of thing with some of our friends. It sounds like work. What are you doing? 

But when we looked at how much time they spent, it really wasn’t that much time. We would just carve out an hour just for the monthly budget. You know, I had everything set up, so we had, it was a standing agenda, you know, and we would do an hour. The quarterly would be like a half a day because we’re going top to bottom, and then we, you know, we always adjust it. 

We would split it, so we start like at 10 in the morning, and then we’ll go to noon, and then we’d have lunch, you know, we’d get lunch, and then after lunch we’d go back and finish up about three or four, you know, and it was great. That was, and if you add that up, you say it’s not a lot of time, but it was, the time spent was so effective, you know, because now it’s not something that’s over there in the cabinet, that sort of thing. 

Just those little repetitions, you know, the monthly budget, the quarterly top-to-bottom meeting, you get it up here as well. You know, so when Gardea and I are talking finances and money, you know, we’re on the same page. So, and that’s worked out great. 

And then what we will do is combine the annuals. We would do an annual as well. We would just fold in the meetings that we would have with you guys, like get the takeaways from what you guys folded into ours. And then we could think about, okay, what do we want the next year to be like? What do we want that to look like? What do we want to achieve? You know, sort of adjust your goals and your targets and things like that. 

So, I mean, and some of the lessons learned from that is that you have to set goals. I mean, in retirement, you have to have goals set. If you don’t have those goals set, I think that’s what in some ways will bring on some of that anxiety and trepidation that people may have, because the goal helps you visualize what it is you need. And then that visualization helps in the execution. It helps you actually execute and take those steps that you need to, to achieve that goal, right? 

Yeah. 

So, I mean, so for us, I would say for folks, um, you know, we don’t, we don’t get too bent out of shape about that, you know. We don’t, you know, it’s not, we don’t get real parochial, pedantic about, you know, we have fun in there, you know. Um, but what we, we also do is we, we, we want to make sure that we’re careful about enjoying the journey as well, you see. 

It’s not about, about just building the wealth just for the sake of building the wealth, you know. You got to enjoy it. You can’t take it with you, right? 

Right, yeah. 

You see, so you got to enjoy. So part of our challenge is, is striking that balance, okay? So because we need money, right? We got to enjoy it too, you know. So we, we tease the kids, you know, depending on how they act up or not act up, you know, that what they get goes up. It’s a moving target. 

It’s a moving target, right? 

Well, Jerry, I think that is awesome. I mean, people spend decades, right, building up this nest egg and working towards this idea of retirement. And then you flip the switch into retirement. And sometimes, you know, those conversations can get ignored in those meetings, right? 

So if you commit, you know, a handful of hours a quarter towards that financial plan as a family, I think it only makes you feel more confident. You understand what’s going on. And then also what we talk about a lot is if something wants to happen to one or the other, you’re both on the same page, right? And you understand it. 

So, you know, people work so hard to get to that stage of retirement, and they’ve got all these visions as far as what they think it’s going to be. I guess maybe a tricky question. What has surprised you the most, um, as you, because you’ve been retired for how long now? 

It’s about two and a half years. 

Two and a half years. So two and a half, so a couple years of experience being fully retired, right? No more paychecks and things like that, using your money, uh, making decisions together, doing some travel and stuff. You got the kids and the grandkids. So what has surprised you the most in this transition that you didn’t think would be a surprise or, you know, has, has shocked you a little bit or something, you know? 

Well, if we, um, okay, it’s a two-parter. I’ll talk more about the financial piece. I’ll talk about that, and then I’ll talk about the psychological. 

Yeah, please. 

The financial piece is when you set the goal and you’re clear about what you want your retirement to look like, and then you think you get that money, okay? I think your head is saying, going to have enough? I mean, it’s always going to say, am I going to have enough? You know, and, you know, so, you know, I think the surprise was if you do that, you do have enough, you know, for what you’ve carved out, the vision that you’ve created. 

Now, the trick is, is what we call scope creep, you know. Don’t let scope creep get in the way, because you could always say, guess what? I’m going to work three more months. 

Right. Oh, yeah. I need just a little more year. 

One more year. One more year. Continues to be one more year. But you pay a price for that. You know, it’s missing that time, you know, with my daughter, you know, my granddaughter’s, you know, recital. You can’t get that back, you know. 

So be mindful of the scope creep. Once you set your goal and you’ve crystallized what you want it to look like, you’ve hit the mark in terms of the numbers, go with it. And guess what you find out? It’s going to work, and you’ll be fine. We don’t worry about it. It’s going to be fine. It works out. You’ll get used to that two-week hit not coming in, you know what I mean? 

Because if you’ve done it right and you have professional help, I believe in that, in addition to you, you know, being responsible as well, it’ll be all right. So that’s, that’s, it’s, it wasn’t as difficult to kind of get off of that, right, you know what I mean, as you, as, as I might’ve thought it was initially. 

Yeah. 

But, and the psychological part is that, you know, it’s, if you have, if you don’t define yourself, if your self-identity is not tied up, you know, in your career, you know, when you leave, you’ll be surprised how quickly, you know, you will be able to put that chapter of your life over here and then begin to blossom and live in this new world that you’ve created in retirement. And that, I think the surprise there was how easy. 

Yeah. I mean, do you miss it? Do you think about it? 

Yeah, I mean, it was a big part of your life. I wouldn’t say I missed it in a sense of yearning for it to return. No. I think about it in a fond way. At this point in retirement, what we’re working on is creating a new story, a new story that defines that part of your life at the end. 

I mean, let’s face it. This is, we call it chapter three, you see. So what is that going to look like? And we want it to be, you know, as, as enjoyable as, as possible. 

We think about, I mean, we’ve built in, you know, some things, uh, in terms of, uh, like some guiding principles, you know. Um, it’ll be all right. As I said, don’t panic. You know, if, you know, things happen, don’t panic. Um, you know, we’ve all have made mistakes through it all. And things have happened that you can’t control anyway, you know, so don’t panic. 

And then just try to be charitable. You know, we built that. You know, when we meet on our quarterlies, we always talk about, we have our list in terms of charity, in terms of how we want to help, different things we want to do. And then just, you know, be loving and kind to people. You know what I mean? 

You know, with those sort of guiding principles that we have, I would say retirement is great. You know, I would recommend it. 

Yeah. Awesome. Well, I mean, what you’ve shared is, I’m talking very, very, very good things for somebody to think through. Love of what a lot of the things that you guys had to try to do. 

I am curious, though, as we kind of wrap up here, you’re two and a half years in. What are some things that you’re looking forward for? You’ve got to say, well, in the next couple years, next year, what are some of the things that you’ve got out there in the goals area? 

Well, one of the things that we said for the next five years, while we have, as we say, a reasonable portion of health, is to travel. I mean, we’re really looking to do some, some, some big travel, okay? 

You know, the next one we have on the books is, I’ve always wanted to do this just from my engineering background, is the Panama Canal, okay? So we’re going to do that. We’re going to, like, really, really do it, you know. 

Um, and then we have a couple other things, like just from the tech side, which both of us are interested in, is trying to get out there and maybe get to a couple places where tech is really hot, like China, okay, and do some of those things. We’re actually, you know, making some of the initial inquiries in terms of how to get there, not so much just, just because of our interest in that, not so much as, as a tourist, but seeing if we can make some connections where we can get a little peek behind the scenes. 

Yeah. 

Along those lines, um, and then I think just, um, really being, I think, um, a bigger part in our family’s lives in terms of the grandkids especially, you know. So, uh, we’ll be spending probably a little more time, uh, going for, we spent this, so far this year, we spent quite a bit of time with them. We get them here, but we want to spend just a little more time because they’re getting into those formative years, you know, with school and stuff like that, and we think we can really help out there. 

Just from some of the research that we’ve seen, when you have, when kids are growing up and, and growing up or at least have, um, routine access to multigenerational parenting, so to speak, they tend to do better, you know. So we, we have, um, had some discussions with, you know, our daughter, uh, and son-in-law about how we can make that work, you know. 

Yeah. 

And, you know, and we have that, we, we can shade the time, you know what I mean? So that’s the good part about it. 

Yeah. I’d say bring us home, Jerry, with my last question to you. For anyone that’s listening that’s maybe a couple years out from retirement, any last-minute thoughts or piece of advice that you would give to that listener that’s contemplating retirement and how to get that all figured out? 

Yeah, I would say, so what, they’re five, ten years out? 

Yeah, I’d say five years out. 

They’re five years out. If they haven’t, I would say right at the top is really, as I mentioned a couple of times earlier, is making sure that you set some goals around what it is you want your retirement to look like. To me, I think that’s clear. And that’s just based on our own experience in doing that. And then just talking to the people in our circles, we find some have done that and some haven’t done that. 

So I would say, look, don’t look at us per se. Think about what you want your retirement to look like. And that’s from day to day. For example, health is really important. First thing we do when we get up is we’re working out. We’re working out and paying attention to that, trying to eat right and that sort of thing. 

If there’s some things that you need to do to shore up the finances, I probably would recommend that they get some professional help at this time, given that the timeline is pretty short of five lines. I would strongly recommend that for sure. 

And then just make a decision about, okay, is it five years or six years or whatever? And then be mindful of the scope creep. If it’s going to be five, it’s five. It’s going to be six, it’s six, it’s three, whatever. And just stand pat to that. Because five years, you know, it’s not a lot of time. People think it sounds like it’s not a lot of time because next thing you know, they’re going to be, you know, making that transition, you know, from their careers into retirement. 

But if they haven’t, set that goal first, get professional help, and then be committed to the vision. You know, don’t let it creep on you. 

Excellent. Well, thank you so much, Jerry. We really do appreciate it. This is going to be good for people to listen to.