One of the ways I earn a living is by recommending that people save money for future goals. So it might seem a bit incongruous to write that I believe that some people use retirement planning as a rationalization for life-experience avoidance.
I meet with people who seem perfectly willing to be miserable in their jobs for 40 years because they believe they’ll be “living the dream” once they turn 65. My problem with that way of thinking is that planning for retirement and living a great life until you retire should not be mutually exclusive. Of the people I’ve met who are already retired, those who had a fulfilling pre-retirement life are having a fulfilling in-retirement life and those who had a crummy pre-retirement life are having a crummy in-retirement life. Why is that? Because the habits, choices, and judgments we make over six decades make for very strongly-entrenched personalities. So if you believe that your retirement years are when you’re finally going to live differently and like you’ve always wanted, how do you expect to accomplish that?
Good retirement planning doesn’t start with determining a targeted future sum of money that you want when you turn 65. Good retirement planning starts with creating the habits now that lend themselves to living a lifestyle that you want for your entire life. The only way I know how to do that is to start acting today like you want to live tomorrow. So do you want to live a great retirement? Then take this free retirement-planning advice:
1) Find something you love to do so that retirement isn’t such a desperate yearning.
2) Establish healthy eating and exercise habits now so you live longer during retirement and enjoy it as a healthy person.
3) Don’t let your “bucket list” fill up too much. Start crossing things off your list now.
4) Travel. Anywhere.
5) Decide that life experiences are worth more than dollars.
If you can do these things then you’ll be committed to proceed to the next step where you’ll build the financial component to support the lifestyle that you want to live. Financial planning itself is not the objective, it is just a method of supplying you with the worldly means of pursuing happiness. So if you choose how you want to live, we’ll help you with the plan for paying for it.
