As featured in Fast Company, author Brian Herriot’s “Time Freedom” makes the case for skipping retirement and designing work you’ll want to keep doing
ALAMEDA, CA, UNITED STATES, September 28, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ — Brian Herriot has some unusual advice for people counting down the years to retirement: don’t retire at all.
Herriot is a financial advisor, speaker, and founder of three businesses. Fast Company featured him this week in “How to achieve time freedom without giving up your career.” His new book, “Time Freedom: Rethink Your Work and Money to Create a Life You Love Now,” asks readers to stop saving for a far-off finish line and start building a working life they’d never want to leave.
“People sometimes get confused when I suggest working flexibly,” Herriot says. “They hear ‘Work whenever you want.’ Then I tell them they should never retire. ‘Wait… so I should work only sometimes, but also forever?’ Yes, both.”
The old plan was to work until sixty-five and then take twenty years off. Fewer people follow it now. People live longer and start second careers, and plenty of retirees end up going back to work. There’s even a name for them: “unretirees.”
Herriot thinks people should skip the retire-then-unretire detour. He tells readers to design the job they want and keep doing it. That means choosing when, where, how much, and for whom they work, and dropping the parts of the job they’ve always disliked. He’d rather call that stage of life “renewal” than retirement.
Herriot got the idea close to home. His grandfather Ken Steffen owned a plumbing and heating shop and retired once the bending, kneeling, and lifting got to be too much. But retirement didn’t suit him.
“Brian, I was so bored I started rotating the wheels on our vacuum cleaner,” he told his grandson.
So Ken went to work at a local hardware store. He’d always liked plumbing and heating, but what he really loved was talking with customers. Ken became the most knowledgeable and helpful person in the store, and the one customers asked for.
“It’s hard to stay retired,” Herriot says. “So instead of retiring only to unretire, let’s design the perfect job and do it forever.”
Grandpa Ken’s experience isn’t unusual. A 2023 Pew Research Center report found that 19% of Americans aged sixty-five and older were working, up from 11% in 1987.
When Herriot dropped retirement as a goal, he found he had more freedom. With a plan to keep working, people don’t have to cram decades of saving into their peak earning years. As Herriot wrote in Fast Company, that pressure lifts, and time off becomes possible now.
Take the gap year. Most professionals think it’s out of reach because a year away means falling behind on savings and pushing retirement back. “When retirement isn’t your goal, you can take a career break to enjoy experiences now that you once thought you had to wait for,” Herriot writes.
He admits this path isn’t for everyone. But for a growing number of professionals, it makes more sense than the traditional plan.
“Time Freedom: Rethink Your Work and Money to Create a Life You Love Now” is endorsed by Cal Newport, author of “Deep Work;” Héctor García, co-author of “Ikigai;” and Tiffany “The Budgetnista” Aliche, author of “Get Good with Money.” The Next Big Idea Club named it the first September 2026 must-read in Personal Finance. It was published September 15 by Page Two Simplified.
Herriot is available for interviews on how to build the money confidence to start working more flexibly, and how to grow a lifestyle business that makes time for what matters most.
Brian Herriot is a financial advisor and entrepreneur based in Alameda, California. He hosts “The Time Freedom Podcast.”
Fast Company featured Herriot on September 26 in “How to achieve time freedom without giving up your career.” In it, he explains how a mix of flexible work and smart investing can get people to time freedom much sooner than full financial independence would.
https://www.fastcompany.com/91611161/time-freedom-career-advice
Media contact: Kirby Denison, kirby@timefreedom.life
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