Most of us spend years obsessing over investing, allocations, withdrawal rates, and our retirement timing — but we also need to think of relationships as their own line item in the retirement plan ledger.

Throughout life, school, work and parenting quietly hand you a social life for free — you hang out with buddies after school, go to lunch with work colleagues, and catch your kid’s activities alongside other parents. When you stop working full-time, or the kids leave the house, those relationships go stale pretty quickly if you’re not diligent about keeping them going.

Enter Robin Dunbar — the Oxford anthropologist behind “Dunbar’s Number.” His research maps our social world into four nested rings: intimate friends, close friends, good friends, and meaningful contacts. Dunbar’s number is 150. Each ring plays a distinct role in our lives.

5 – Intimate: Our deepest emotional& life connections
15 – Close friends: regular companionship, conversation, and real trust
50 – Good friends: shared activities, wider world perspective
150 – Meaningful contacts: community belonging, casual acquaintances

At the center, your 5 most intimate relationships most often include family — your spouse, kids, parents, and siblings. Your spouse plays the keystone role all of your life choices & time. They frame the emotional context of your life, but they can’t be your entire support system.

Having multiple intimate relationships builds a more resilient life — so when illness, travel, or a bad week strikes, the support you need doesn’t all fall on one person. Kids and your closest immediate family members are critical.

Beyond your intimate friends, your circle of 15 close friends are also especially important. You can’t fill the 15-close-friend ring with just immediate family. You need to get out and “curate” these relationships – built around shared interests and activities. They often become the basis of your regular social life and adventures.

In fact, research on friendships & happiness has shown that nothing predicts loneliness more strongly than your number of these close friends — not marriage, not parenthood, not net worth. Many people — especially men — run a scarcity in this ring. Research from the Survey Center on American Life found that about 75% of men have five or less close friends today, with 15% having ZERO close friends outside their family members.

Building your 5/15/50/150 circles should be fun – doing cool things you and your friends enjoy together. Reaching out to people you haven’t seen in a while. Think of it as like an investment fund: contribute regularly, long before you need it, and enjoy watching it grow.  Join a volunteer group, start riding in a biking club, launch a neighborhood gourmet group, or host a monthly poker night.  

When I look at my closest circle of friends, I see pals of mine childhood & college, people I’ve met through activities, current & past neighbors, spouses of my wife’s friends, and former work & board colleagues. The easiest way to get someone into your circle for 15 is to invite someone you haven’t seen in a while from your 50 or 150 to lunch, or for happy hour.

For anyone planning a 40-year retirement, curating these friendships deserves the same intentional design as your financial strategies. The good news is that early retirement gives you the one resource friendship actually requires: TIME. Spend some of that time on people, not just projects.

A portfolio of relationships — intimate, close, good, and meaningful — is the diversification that protects your retirement from the risk no spreadsheet can model: isolation.

How are you doing in curating your friend circles? Are you intentional about it?

Image: ChatGPT