One of my former partners checked out my profile on LinkedIn the other day. Since he is a litigator, my paranoid streak honed to perfection during my forty-year career got me thinking that perhaps he was trying to find an address for service. More likely, he was just checking to see if I am still alive and writing annoying things about my time in the legal profession.
I’m not sure I can say there is a clean line between me as an individual and me as a lawyer.
~ Anita Hill
Retiring from the legal profession will be difficult for some of us, because too often it is not only what we do, but it is who we are. You cannot retire from who you are.
As human beings, who we socialize with is also part of who we are. Quite unsurprisingly, William Butler Yeats said it better than I could when he wrote, “Think where man’s glory begins and ends, and say my glory was I had such friends.”
In Part Four I wrote about the dread that some of us experience when we contemplate the fantasy Number that we think that we have to save in order to retire. Once I abandoned my original demented plan to work as long as it took to achieve my Number, I asked my financial planner to run one of those fancy computer programs which tells you where to take your money from to fund your lifestyle. In my case, the choices were: (a) personal savings, including my TFSA; (b) my professional corporation; and (c) my RRSP.
Husband: “Green Acres is the place to be…keep Manhattan, just give me that countryside.”
Wife: “New York is where I’d rather stay. I get allergic smelling hay. I just adore a penthouse view. Dah-ling I love you but give me Park Avenue.”
~ Lyrics by Vic Mizzy
My older readers will recognize the lyrics above. The young folks will have to Google them.
Way back in 1997, my firm had an existential crisis when our three largest rainmakers decided to ditch private practice to chase the really big money. And of course, they all wanted their capital back. At the same time.
So, brilliant lawyer that I was, after surviving that crisis I revised our partnership agreement to limit the amount of capital that the firm could be required to pay out in any one year.
This is Part Four of my series on retiring from the legal profession. In the first three parts, I did not even mention “the Number.”
We all know what the Number is. That is the amount of investments that you supposedly require so that you can retire.
I spent many years waiting to finally hit the Number and be able to retire. I asked my friends about their Number. I read articles about getting to the Number. I spoke to my financial advisor about getting me to the Number. I pondered the impact of my lifestyle on achieving the Number. I obsessed about what the right Number was and when, if ever, I was going to get there.
In Part One, I told you to figure out what you want your retirement to look like. In Part Two I advised you to get to know yourself.
This time, a cautionary note. You need to figure out if you really want to retire or whether you are just burned out.
In Part One of my series on retirement, I defined retirement as being “when you are doing exactly what you want to be doing,” and I wrote about needing to figure out what exactly what that is. In order to do that, you need to know yourself. For some of us that is easy. For others, not so much.
“I look in the mirror and wonder who the little old lady staring back at me is.”
Doris Gottheil, age 95
What a strange title. Everyone knows that it is only old lawyers who have to worry about retirement, not young ones. Right?
I think not.
Hey law firms! Have you given much thought to your partners approaching retirement, and calculated what their retirement may cost you?