Why “One More Year” Is Rarely About the Money

Note: The examples and case studies in this article are hypothetical but represent real situations I have encountered in my practice working with Washington State public employees.

The client who kept saying “one more year”

Ron showed up to our call last fall with a spreadsheet he’d clearly been staring at for months.
He’s 57. Public works supervisor for his county, nearly 30 years in PERS 2. Between his pension, his DCP balance, and what he and his wife have saved, the numbers worked. We ran them again. They worked again.

Then he said the thing I hear more than almost anything else.

“Let’s just give it one more year.”

I asked him why. Markets felt shaky. Maybe a little more cushion. You know how it is.

But I’d heard him say “one more year” the year before. And the year before that.

At some point it stops being a financial decision. (He knew it too. He just hadn’t said it out loud yet.)

When the math is done arguing with you

Here’s what I’ve come to believe after working with public employees who are this close to the door.

If you’ve got a pension coming, a DCP balance, and money in the bank, and the plan still checks out, no new number is going to set you free.

A behavioral finance researcher named Daniel Crosby puts it bluntly. He says if you handed someone like Ron a crystal ball that guaranteed he’d be financially secure for the rest of his life, most people in his shoes still wouldn’t retire tomorrow.

Sit with that for a second.

If certainty isn’t the thing holding you back, then the problem was never the money. And no spreadsheet I build is going to fix a problem that isn’t on the spreadsheet.

The two questions I started asking instead

So now, when a client is clearly ready on paper but stuck in real life, I stop running projections for a minute. I borrow two questions from Crosby’s work.

The first: if you knew for certain you’d be fine, would you walk away tomorrow?

When the honest answer is no, that tells us something. There’s something work is giving you that doesn’t show up on a balance sheet.

The second: what is that something?

For a lot of folks, especially the ones who’ve spent decades inside one agency, work is where the people are. It’s the team. The problem to solve. The quiet pride of being good at something. Take that away on a Friday with nothing waiting on Monday, and the pension doesn’t help much.

Crosby points out that men in particular tend to walk into retirement without much of a social life outside the job. I see it constantly. The financial plan is airtight and the life plan is blank.

It doesn’t have to be a light switch

One thing that’s helped my clients more than any withdrawal strategy is realizing retirement isn’t on or off.

You don’t have to grind full-time until a Friday and then do nothing forever.

Some of the happiest retired public employees I work with eased out of it. They went part-time first. Picked up some consulting. Kept one foot in the thing that gave them purpose while finally making room for the rest of their life.

That middle path has a financial bonus too. Every year you hold off tapping your DCP or your personal savings is a year that money keeps working. Your pension gives you a foundation most private-sector folks would envy, which means you have more freedom to design a slow exit, not less.

What actually fills the gap

Crosby talks about five things the happiest retirees tend to have lined up before they leave. I think about them with clients now almost as much as I think about Roth conversions.

Fun and leisure, the part everybody plans for. The social side, which most people don’t. Some kind of deep, absorbing work, paid or not, that makes you lose track of time. Something bigger than yourself, like volunteering or faith or community. And a reason to keep growing instead of coasting.

Money really only buys the first one. The other four you have to go get on your own.
That’s usually the part nobody warned them about.

Where the planning actually comes in

I’m a CPA, so I won’t pretend the numbers don’t matter. They do, and there’s real work to do before you leave.

You have a pension option to lock in, and that survivor decision is permanent. You have a healthcare gap to bridge from your late 50s to Medicare at 65, and the PEBB rules deserve a careful look before you assume anything. You have Social Security timing to coordinate with everything else, and that one tends to reward patience more than people expect.

That’s where I earn my keep. That’s the part I can build for you.

But I’ve stopped pretending it’s the whole picture.

A few honest next steps

If you’re the one saying “one more year,” try Crosby’s first question this week. If certainty wouldn’t change your answer, the thing in front of you isn’t financial.

Start sketching the life side while you’re still working. Who you’ll see. What you’ll build. What’s going to get you out of bed on a Tuesday in February.

And let’s lock down the financial pieces so they can’t be the excuse: the pension election, the PEBB-to-Medicare bridge, the income plan that pulls from the right account at the right time.
Ron and I are still working on his. The numbers were never really the holdup, and once he admitted that, the planning got a lot more useful.

​The plan on paper matters. I’ll always make sure yours is solid. But the retirement you actually want to live is a separate project, and it starts with being honest about what’s really keeping you at your desk.