Is Early Retirement as Good as It Sounds?

It feels like among pharmacists, there's a growing interest in early retirement and financial independence.

But I've often wondered what people really want is, is it early retirement itself, or is it just the options and the flexibility and the freedom to have something different than maybe the grind of, of the day-to-day week to week job? So when you hear someone say, Hey, Tim, I'd love to retire early as a goal, especially you're talking to prospective clients.

What do you think is going on there? What do you think they're actually saying?

Um, I think burnout could be definitely part of this.

Um, I was reading, uh, an article, I think it was, uh, from like Walters Kluwer.

Um, and it basically, I think it was a pharmacist that was kind of talking about the pervasiveness of burnout, you know, in the pharmacy world, it affects about 50% of pharmacy professionals.

The drivers here are things like understaffing, metric driven, metric heavy workloads, expanding clinical duties.

And, you know, it leads to physical, emotional and cognitive exhaustion.

Right.

So I definitely think that there is a. a major thread of that that's driving the conversation.

And I think for some, I think it's just, it's maybe tied more towards not having, you know, really having more options, not necessarily being tied to a job, you know, having autonomy over your entire day.

So I think there's a few things at play here, but I definitely think that burnout can be a major contributing factor to why people are looking for the exits from a for retirement sake.

Yeah, that's a topic that has grown for good reason, has grown in discussion in our profession, you know, over the last, feels like since COVID in particular.

I think the issues have been going on much, much longer than that, but we're seeing the national associations and others with really an uptick around committees and groups.

And we see state associations lobbying for rules with state boards around the Things like work hours and lunch breaks and rules around metrics and, you know, all the things that have happened really in the last five years, although it feels like these issues have been brewing for much longer than that.

Yeah.

But it is worth mentioning here, right? Because a decision like an early retirement decision.

can have such a profound implication, not only on our financial plan, but on our lives, right? I think for many people, we've talked about this in the show on many people, for many pharmacists, there can be, even in situations of work that are less than ideal, there can be feelings of contribution and a sense of purpose.

And at one point, we'd like to believe that most pharmacists got into the profession because they you know enjoyed the work and and maybe enjoyed some of the patient interactions of patient care or whatever work they're doing that they're having a sense of contribution and so in early retirement one of the potential challenges could be a gap in that work and obviously we've got to be able to plan for it financially And so if burnout is at the center of this issue, are we maybe planning for something without addressing the root cause? Like, is there potentially a different work environment or could we take a year off? You know, could we look at a part-time employment or shift in the role that we're at even within an organization or at another employer as well?