Retirement Rehearsal: The $52.4B Behavioral Risk You Can Fix

Benjamin Brandt's Retirement Starts Today argues that the biggest risk in retirement is not running out of money – it is running out of purpose. The book's core thesis: retirees should rehearse their post-work life before leaving the workforce. The financial cost of skipping that rehearsal is real. Brandt cites $52.4 billion in unused vacation pay and personal time off squandered every year. That number is a proxy for how little people experiment with free time before retirement.

The naive read is that retirement rehearsal is a lifestyle luxury. The better market read is that it is a capital preservation tool. Retirees who discover they hate golf after buying a country club membership, or who sink savings into a second home they rarely use, are making expensive mistakes that a rehearsal could have prevented. The sunk-cost fallacy then locks them into activities they do not enjoy, creating a cycle of dissatisfaction and further portfolio depletion.

The Financial Cost of an Unrehearsed Retirement

Brandt opens with a warning familiar to financial planners. Clients who spent decades obsessing over the financial transition often feel lost on day one of retirement. "Either they've been so laser-focused on the financial transition that they now feel a bit lost, or they've romanticized retirement without test-driving how they would actually spend their time," he writes.

The consequence is both emotional and financial. Brandt describes clients who thought they would golf every day, only to grow bored within 18 months and start spending reactively on new hobbies. When retirees spend their way out of boredom – buying boats, vacation homes, or expensive hobbies – they accelerate portfolio depletion. Unused PTO figures show the pattern begins well before retirement: people do not even use the free time they already have to test what they love.

The $52.4 Billion Proxy

Brandt uses that number to illustrate the gap between intention and action. If workers cannot even use their earned vacation to experiment with retirement activities, they are unlikely to have a clear plan when the paycheck stops. The financial risk is not just the cost of a bad hobby – it is the lost compounding that would have occurred if that money had remained invested.

Phased Retirement as a Capital Preservation Tool

Brandt offers two concrete rehearsal methods, both designed to reduce the probability of costly post-retirement pivots. The first is a phased retirement plan that spreads experimentation over three years.

The Three-Year Phase-Down

Year one: reduce hours from 40 to 30 per week, freeing one day for retirement practice. Year two: drop to 20 hours, ideally on consecutive days (Monday-Tuesday or Thursday-Friday) to simulate a four-day weekend. Year three: decide whether to fully retire, continue part-time, or pivot to a new role.

Phase	Hours per Week	Rehearsal Days	Primary Goal
Year 1	30	1 day/week	Build a single average retired day
Year 2	20	2 consecutive days/week	Test extended routines and weekend blocks
Year 3	Variable	Full time or part time	Decision point based on data

Practical rule: A phased retirement converts the biggest unknown – how you will actually spend 40+ hours a week – into a low-cost experiment. The financial risk is limited to the income you forgo, which is far smaller than the cost of a bad full retirement decision.

Vacation Rehearsals: Testing the Average Retired Day

The second method is simpler: use at least one week of vacation each year to live exactly as you would in retirement. No travel, no work – just a normal day. Brandt recommends this practice for several years before full retirement.

"Look for what bores you, what excites you, and what you can learn from the experience," he writes. Repeating this over multiple years builds a clearer vision of the person you are becoming.

The Risk of Romanticized Hobbies

Brandt warns against using a cruise or a vacation to test retirement. Those are one-off events that represent 1/100th of your actual retirement life. The real test is an average retired day: wake-up time, physical activity, lunch with a spouse, afternoon hobbies, evening reading. Building that day brick by brick through reduced hours or vacation rehearsals gives real data on what retirement will cost and what you will actually enjoy.

What Would Confirm the Thesis: Employer Adoption of Phase-Down Programs

The biggest variable in the rehearsal framework is employer policy. If large employers begin offering formal phase-down programs – allowing workers to drop to 30 or 20 hours while keeping benefits – the rehearsal approach becomes much easier to execute. A shift in corporate HR policy toward phased retirement would confirm that the market sees value in reducing retiree capital destruction.

What Would Weaken It: The 'I'll Figure It Out' Mindset

The thesis fails if retirees ignore the rehearsal advice. Brandt points to clients who say they will wait until retirement to do what they love – a statement he interprets as a sign they do not know what they love. Without rehearsal, the improvisation approach works only for the rare retiree who adapts quickly. For most, the odds of a costly pivot are high. The $52.4 billion in unused PTO suggests the gap between intention and action is structural, not a simple education problem.

The Decision Point for Advisors and Pre-Retirees

This is not a stock-specific risk event. It is a behavioral risk event that affects every retiree's portfolio longevity. Advisors who incorporate rehearsal into their planning process reduce the probability of clients making emotional, capital-destroying decisions in the first two years of retirement. For individual investors, the takeaway is concrete: use phased retirement or vacation rehearsals to test your retirement day before you commit to it.

Brandt's book is repetitive – it could have been a four-part article series – but its central point is worth the read. The financial risk of skipping the rehearsal is far larger than the cost of doing it. Start building an average retired day now, one small step at a time. The alternative is waiting for opening night to learn your lines, and that rarely ends well.

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