He spends much of his time helping people into retirement through his writing and seminars.
Previously in his career, he gave financial advice to many people to help them plan for it.
But while advising on retirement — a word he does not like as he believes it has connotations of old age — might have long been a big part of his professional life, he is yet to do it himself.
“For my own retirement, I am shy to the point of embarrassment.
“When I boil this down, I fear I will let myself go in retirement and stop learning and growing,” he said.
Mr Hawes, who is in his 70s, has moved from Queenstown where he lived for many years to Sumner, a beach suburb of Christchurch.
He was still climbing and mountaineering and has now added open-water swimming to his repertoire.
He has penned 24 books on personal finance and his latest, Retirement Ready, went on sale this month, and included his own experiences with retirement planning.
He said the hard part was not the technical stuff, it was the emotional side of it.
He had looked after his own investments for 45 years and to hand his investment capital over to investment professionals was difficult.
He admitted he was only doing an average job of looking after
his investments, as he had so many other roles he was not giving it his full concentration and priority.
While he was a reasonable buyer of investments, he was not a very good seller as he tended to get emotionally attached.
What was also difficult about retirement was saying, “I’m not going to go into that office any more”.
For Mr Hawes, he had the model of his own father who continued to practice medicine until he was 81, dying a few months later after a 60-year medical career.
“I had that as a model. He never really retired.
“Medicine was a huge part of his life.
“To stop, to just walk away from medicine, would have just been impossible for him.”
So what was the key to preparing for retirement?
“Plan and plan early,” he said.
“Even if that plan might change, it was better to have one than not to have one.”
And the right age to start thinking retirement?
Ideally that was primary school, although that was not going to happen.
“The thing young people have going for them is compound interest: a small amount becomes a large amount courtesy of time.”
Mr Hawes believed 50 was a good time to start thinking about what was not so much about retirement, but what that next stage of life was going to look like.
About 48% of people aged 65-70 were still working.
From around 50, there was potential to drop a day or two a week and not completely finish work until 70 or 75.
Personally, it was when Mr Hawes was 50 that he started realising time was “creeping by”.
He wished he had handed over his money to other people to manage earlier and also that he had taken a year off like a sabbatical.
There appeared to be more discussion about retirement, partly brought about by the advent of KiwiSaver, and lifestyle was also becoming more important.
One mistake he made, which he outlined in the book, was cancelling his health insurance.
Three months later, he was having surgery and having to pay for it from a health fund he had.
