The Empty Nest Means Big Changes | EP4

What if the silence after your kids leave isn’t emptiness, but your invitation to grow? In today’s inspiring episode, Matt Meline shares a powerful case study for anyone feeling lost, restless, or ready to reinvent themselves after years of putting family first. From letting grief breathe to rediscovering creativity and redefining career purpose, Matt reveals how to turn the empty nest into a season of growth, joy, and self-discovery. If you’ve ever wondered what’s next after raising kids, this one’s your permission to slow down, get curious, and dream again. Press play, feel the shift, and reclaim your spark today.


Digital Asset:
Download Our Empty Nest Success Checklist - https://prairiefirewealth.com/areas-of-focus/empty-nest-planning/


Episode highlights:
(1:54) The emotional shock of an empty house
(4:28) When career success stops feeling fulfilling
(6:19) The turning point: Slowing down to heal
(7:48) Grab your free Empty Nest Success Checklist. Your guide to turning an empty nest into your best chapter. https://prairiefirewealth.com/areas-of-focus/empty-nest-planning/
(9:08) Dreaming again with your partner
(10:57) Three reflections for this next chapter
(12:06) Reinvention starts with one small step
(13:04) Outro

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Transcript

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So you don't need to be productive while you're still healing. And so the second thing that she did is it got very creative and very curious. And so instead of asking, what should I do next, she asks, what makes me feel alive? What do I really, really enjoy that I'm doing? And for Susan, that was writing. She'd always loved it, but it never really had time. So she joined a local writing group. And it wasn't the plan to publish a book or anything like that, just to play with this creativity that she was exploring in her life. Welcome to the Empty Nest Full Pockets Podcast. This is a show for parents who have launched their kids and are ready to reclaim their time, their purpose, and their financial power. Hey, I'm Matt Moleen. I'm a financial planner. I'm an empty nester, and a fellow traveler on this new adventure. After years of putting others first, the school drop-offs, the college decisions, soccer practice, late-night talks. This season is finally yours. But let's be real, it's not just about freedom and wine at 5 o'clock. It's also about navigating college costs, caring for our aging parents, real estate decisions, shifting our careers, and helping our adult kids without sacrificing our own dreams. So each week we're going to dive into some real life questions that come after the kids leave the nest. So through stories, expert insights, and a little bit of humor, we're going to explore how to turn this life transition into your next great chapter. Hello, welcome. Welcome to the Empty Nest Full Pockets Podcast. Here we talk about navigating life, money, and meaning in the season after the kids leave home. Today I want to talk through a real life case study. And this is one for those of you out there that are still maybe adjusting to the quiet house, maybe wondering what you should do with the rest of your life. Just kind of wondering in a lot of cases about your career, your business, those kind of things. And in a lot of cases, it's can I do something different? Should I do something different? Is there a way to downshift, reduce my stress in life based on my work? Now that the kids are gone, do I have some financial flexibility that I can do some different things that I wouldn't have been able to do in the past? And to study this, I want to dig into a case study in the story of Susan. So just so you know, Susan is not a real person, but her story is drawn from many real conversations that I have had over the years with my clients, my friends, fellow empty nesters that have all been through it. So let's take a look at Susan's journey. Many of us understand the emotional earthquake of the kids leaving home, gone through this a lot in the past on our podcast, and we'll talk about it a lot in the future because it's a huge deal. But Susan's 52. Her daughter Emma was an only child and just left for her freshman year of college, and she is three states away. So it really hit her like a truck. When she was in the truck, she knew this day was coming. She helped Emma pack. She smiled at moving. She even kept it together for the drive home. But when she walked into that silent house, it just wasn't peaceful. It was really, really painful. What she told me is I felt like somebody had hit pause on my life. I didn't know what to do with myself. I felt, in a word, aimless. And for those of you that have left your kids off at school, you know a little bit how this feels. I don't know if I've ever told you the story of how I left my children, but when I took Matthew to school at the University of Iowa to this really, really crummy dorm room, I left after a day of Target and getting everything loaded up, cable cords, all that fun stuff, and pretty much balled on the way whole way home back to Des Moines. And then when Anna left, I sandbagged. I wouldn't actually leave. I would just kind of hang out with her. I took her to beat ubs, wanted to go see some of the other dorms. She's funny like dad. And so I left. And I also cried the whole way home from there, too. But it's just a tough thing, and we all feel it. And that aimless feeling that Susan was feeling is pretty common. So it really is how striking this common it is, especially for parents that have only children. For 18 plus years, you've been, identity has been anchored in parenting these kids, and suddenly that role shifts. And it can feel like you've kind of lost your job, you've lost your roommate, maybe you've lost your purpose, and all of this has happened in one weekend. And for me, this started maybe even before they they left. I mean, can you relate when they start driving and just get more and more independent as they get older? You feel like they're already leaving you, and they feel like ungrateful little SHITs sometimes that you're like, I've done all this for you, gotten you ready, and now you're just bailing on me, and that's a painful feeling, and that's definitely one that Susan was dealing with. And so what she also found is that she also had some career angst and just found that the career that she had was maybe no longer enough. She was very, very successful. She had worked in healthcare management for over two decades. She had climbed to an impressive spot. However, there was always pressure to do more, and doing more always was weighing on her mental anguish and her mental angst. And eventually it began to impact her mental and physical health. To where she was wondering, is this even worth it anymore? And now there's no more track meets, there's no more choir concerts to rush to after work. And she realized how much of her time was spent just kind of going through the motions. What she said to us is I didn't I don't hate my job, but I don't want to spend the next 15 years just enduring it. And I definitely don't want to continue living with so much stress. And this too, my friends, is like a very familiar crossroad. You know, when the fog lifts from parenting, you start to see your own life a lot more clearly. And sometimes it's the first time in many years that you've had a chance to take a breath and look at your and look at your life. And so we see this a lot with the career angst in that people that have been doing something for a long time didn't even realize they didn't like it. They were just so busy doing it and taking care of their family. And the family was enough of a divergence and taking care of the kids that you didn't realize that you were maybe unhappy at your work or that it had become much more stressful. For Susan, she had a lot of people reporting to her. She had a lot of case study type of work that she wasn't enjoying anymore. She began to feel sick, and not just mentally, but physically. So she was then beginning to s see some of the warning signs that we see that this is maybe a time for a change where health is being beginning to diminish, more alcohol use, and just basically a lot of despair. And so what Susan did is tried to find a better lifestyle fit by turning the page. And so here's what she did next. And maybe her story can offer a spark of encouragement if you're feeling the same way. The first thing she did is give herself permission not to rush. She wrote things down, she walked more, and she let herself cry a little bit, and she let the grief of this transition be real. So you don't need to be productive while you're still healing. And so the second thing that she did is it got very creative and very curious. And so instead of asking what should I do next, she asks, What makes me feel alive? What do I really, really enjoy that I'm doing? And for Susan that was writing. She'd always loved it, but it never really had time. So she joined a local writing group. And it wasn't the plan wasn't to publish a book or anything like that, just to play with this creativity that she was exploring in her life. The third thing that she did was explore a career pivot. So this was not an overnight career change, but small shifts. She worked with her management team to determine if the staffing levels were correct and where she could work on less time-demanding projects. So by asking this, she was able to get more staff to back up what was going on. The less time-demanding projects then allowed her to do more writing and things in her work. So she found a new passion, a new creativity flow that she was able to bring into her work. Now, she was lucky. I understand for many of you out there, you're not able just to go into your boss and say, listen, I'm going to explore my creativity, doggone it. And I want you to help me do that. That's not always how it goes, unfortunately. So she was lucky that way. Everybody, I want to let you know about our emptiness success checklist that we put together. This is nine pages, chock full of resources just for the empty nester with podcasts, articles, all kinds of links for tools and apps that you can use as you go on your empty nest journey. So if you'd like a free copy of the Empty Nest Success checklist, please look in the show notes and or visit our website for your free copy today. Thanks. And sometimes for some people, there are bigger changes required. For instance, once again, I had someone that I worked with, not his real name, but Doug was working for the big banks and was just really, really stressed. The higher up we get, especially in this stage of life, you're likely in your 50s. You could have been working at something for 20, 30 plus years at this point and could be a very high-level executive up in your company, have a lot of people reporting to you, and the stress can just get overwhelming. And so it was for Doug, he was getting sick, he was feeling less and less energy, and just really realized he couldn't do it any longer. And so he was able to leave that big bank, go to a smaller one, comparable compensation. He actually geographically left as well, got to a warmer climate where he was happier, felt better, worked in a lower stress environment, and was able to do that out until the point that he retired. The fourth thing then back to Susan that she did is that she and her husband, who was going through his own version of reinvention at this time, started dreaming together again, um, and not just about retirement, but about this middle season. And you hear me talk about this a lot because I feel these years can be by far the most rewarding. You've really pumped a lot into other people. First you're growing up, kind of dealing with life, figuring out who you are. Then you spend the next twenty to thirty years parenting, being part of a family, which is again amazing and so rewarding in life. But now you have this moment to really focus on you and you and your and your spouse if you're married, about what you might want to accomplish and do. And you have a a window of time that you can really explore this and not feel guilty about it or selfish about it. So they started asking themselves, what could they do together now that the Friday nights weren't dictated by high school football games? And then the next part we want to talk about on this is, you know, what does this all mean for you? And are you able to find some meaning in the pivot, as we'll call it? And so if you're listening today and thinking, wow, this is me, I am Susan, or I am Doug, and I want to really encourage you and leave you with three simple reflections. The first is that grief is real. There has been a loss. I remember this back to when I got divorced. And there isn't like a benchmark or a ceremony when you get divorced or when you become an empty nester. You don't put a placard in the paper that this is going on. It just happens and you've just got to deal with it. You've just got to cope. And that sucks because if there's you know, sadly to say, when someone passes away, at least you have the funeral and you have the things that you can talk about with your friends, you can remember the happy times. Of course, you do this with uh an empty nest and you do this with a divorce or those kind of transitions too, but you've experienced something incredibly uh painful and then you figure out maybe this is something that you can learn from. And so it doesn't mean you're weak, it just means that you're feeling lost or saddened, it just that you're human. And grieving at the end of an active parenting season is a sign that you loved it very, very deeply. The second thing that you get to do is ask bigger questions. You know, what did I enjoy? What matters most to me now? What would I try if I wasn't afraid of failing? There's a book I've been reading right now, it's got a a vulgar title, but it's basically the subtle art of not giving a F U C K. And in that book he talks a lot about if you don't fail, you'll never learn to succeed. And now we can look back on our failures and really use them to our advantage. And I think this is a great season of life to really explore that. So if you're interested on how to fail and then move forward, I'd encourage you to check out our Prairie Fire Origin story, which we'll include in the show notes, and you can talk about how these and you can see how these massive life changes have affected us and how we've helped answer them along the way. The third thing then I'd say is okay to build slowly. You don't need to blow up your life. You don't need to move to a monastery in Vermont, unless of course you want to. I loved the monastery that I visited. It was in Kansas, and it was a monastery made up of nuns versus monks, but boy, the simplicity of their life, the way they communicate with each other, the quiet, it was just really, really impressive. I couldn't live there, I wouldn't be a good monk. However, if you're planning to blow up your life and move to a monastery, I encourage you to visit one first. Reinvention can start with one conversation. It can start with one new hobby, or one decision just to care again. So Susan's story is still unfolding just like yours. And so what I hope is that if anything today resonated with you, we would love to hear from you. So shoot me a message on LinkedIn, I'm easy to find, or Matt at PFWplanning.com. And if you think a friend or a spouse might benefit from this episode, please consider sending it their way. We are in this season of life together for sure. So one of the things that we've built to really help out our parents and our fellow empty nesters is our emptiness success checklist. This is available at our website, which is www.pfwplanning.com. And on there you're going to get a full eight to ten pages of tools, techniques, things to help during this journey. It's completely free, available to download. And if you want to dig even deeper into the emptiness journey, please check out my book, Emptiness Full Plan. I can't even remember the name of it anymore, Emptiness Full Pockets, which is also available on our website or on Amazon. So until next time, here's two. Happy days, more clarity, and the courage to design what's next for you. Thanks so much. Thank you for joining me on this episode of Empty Nest Full Pockets. If you're navigating some big life transitions and big financial decisions, this is the place to be. Don't forget to follow the show, leave a review, and share it with a friend who's entering this new chapter. Until next time, keep your heart full, your mind clear, and your pockets even fuller. Giddy up