What Happens When You've Spent 35 Years Being a Barrister and Suddenly You Don’t Have to Be One Anymore?

There is understandably a great deal of discussion about the financial side of retirement, particularly for those approaching the end of a long and successful professional career, but I have often thought that one of the more difficult questions has very little to do with pensions, investments or tax, and is instead much more personal: what happens when you have spent 30 or 35 years being a barrister and, suddenly, you don't have to be one anymore?

For somebody who has spent that length of time at the Bar, being a barrister is unlikely to be simply what they do for a living. It has probably shaped a significant part of their adult life, from the years spent qualifying and establishing a practice, through to building a reputation, developing relationships within chambers and becoming accustomed to the particular demands, pressures and rhythms of the profession. When something has occupied that much of your life, it is perhaps unsurprising that the prospect of leaving it behind can feel rather more complicated than simply reaching a date in the diary and deciding that you have worked for long enough.

Over the years I have spoken to many people approaching retirement who are, financially at least, in the fortunate position of having choices. They may have accumulated sufficient pensions, investments and other assets to maintain the lifestyle they want without continuing to work, and the financial modelling may show quite clearly that they could retire tomorrow if they wished to, but that does not necessarily mean that they are ready to do so.

I think that distinction is important, because there is a considerable difference between being financially able to retire and actually wanting to retire.

For a barrister who has spent decades building a career, work provides considerably more than an income. There is the intellectual challenge, the relationships, the routine, the responsibility and the satisfaction that can come from being very good at something you have spent a large part of your life learning how to do. There is also, inevitably, a certain amount of identity attached to it; when somebody asks what you do, you have probably answered that you are a barrister for most of your adult life, and I suspect it is very difficult to spend 35 years doing something without allowing it to become, at least in some small way, part of who you are.

That is why I sometimes wonder whether we focus too much on the question, “When can I retire?”, when a more useful question might be, “When can I reach the point where I no longer have to work?”

The difference between those two questions may appear fairly small, but in practice I think it can be enormous.

If your financial position means that work has become optional, retirement no longer needs to be a cliff edge where you move from a full professional life on Friday to being “retired” on Monday morning. You might decide to continue practising because you still enjoy it, but take fewer cases or become more selective about the work you accept. You might want to spend more time mentoring younger members of chambers, pursue other professional interests, travel more, spend more time with family or simply begin creating a little more space in a life that has been dictated by briefs, conferences, court dates and deadlines for many years.

Equally, you might decide that you have had enough and would quite happily never open another set of papers again. There is no correct answer, which is precisely the point.

Good financial planning should create the freedom to make that decision for yourself, rather than allowing uncertainty about money to make it for you.

Of course, the numbers still matter enormously. Before somebody makes a significant decision about reducing their workload or retiring altogether, they need to understand what they have accumulated, what level of income their assets can reasonably support, how their expenditure might change over time and what the consequences could be if markets, inflation, tax or their personal circumstances change. Those are the foundations of sensible retirement planning and, without them, it is very difficult to make decisions with any real confidence.

However, once those foundations are in place, I think the conversation becomes much more interesting, because knowing that you can retire does not tell you whether you should, when you might want to, or what you would actually like your life to look like afterwards.

Perhaps one of the more useful exercises is simply to imagine an ordinary week rather than the retirement we tend to picture in brochures, which usually seems to involve an implausible amount of walking along beaches.

What does a Tuesday morning look like when there are no papers waiting to be read, no conference in the diary and nowhere in particular that you need to be? Which parts of your professional life would you genuinely miss, and which would you be perfectly happy to leave behind? Are there things you have wanted to do for years but continually postponed because work got in the way, and, once you finally have the time to do them, are they enough to give your days the sense of purpose and structure that your career previously provided?

These are not really financial questions, and I certainly wouldn't pretend that a financial adviser has all of the answers to them, but I do think they belong in the financial planning conversation because money and life are rather difficult to separate. There is little value in producing a beautifully constructed retirement plan that demonstrates somebody can stop working at 60 if nobody has taken the time to ask whether stopping at 60 is actually what they want.

For somebody approaching the end of a long career at the Bar, there may also be an element of loss involved that we perhaps do not acknowledge enough. You are not only leaving behind an income; you may be leaving a professional community, a position you have worked extremely hard to reach, a routine that has governed your life for decades and a version of yourself with which you have become very familiar. That does not make retirement something to fear, but it does make it something worth thinking about rather more deeply than simply choosing a date.

I have always believed that the purpose of financial planning is not simply to help people accumulate as much money as possible. It is to help them reach a position where their money gives them choices, and where they understand those choices well enough to make decisions with confidence.

For somebody who has spent 35 years at the Bar, perhaps the most valuable point is not the day they retire at all. Perhaps it is the day they realise that they no longer have to be a barrister, but can choose whether they still want to be one.

And that is a very different conversation.