While most retirement calculators are useful in helping you plan your financial future, they ignore the equally important lifestyle issues. The big problem when most people start thinking about their retirement is that the process often raises a lot of media generated negative issues like – “The end of my productive life”, “losing my independence”, “aged care”, “not having enough money”. With all these negatives surrounding it, it’s not surprising that many people don’t want to think seriously about retirement planning. This is a bad idea.
The rest of your life is too important to be left to chance and the benefits of doing some real retirement planning make it a very worthwhile exercise.
The first thing to realise is that retirement planning is not just about calculating how much money you’ll need and how much you’ll currently have. It’s really all about planning the next stage of your life and that can be a very exciting project. For most of us it’s the first time in our lives that we have the time and the freedom to do the things that we want to do rather than the things we have to do.
There’s plenty of evidence to suggest that those people who have a clear sense of direction about what they want to do with their retirement years have a far greater chance of achieving a happy and satisfying lifestyle in their later years.
There are 5 basic challenges that most of us will have to manage in our full or part time retirement years. They are –
- Our Finances
- Our Health
- Understanding what our new lifestyle involves
- Our Relationships
- Finding lasting Happiness
Because retirement involves such a major change in our lives, it’s a good idea to spread the transition over a few years. Many people do this by gradually cutting back on their working hours by going onto a 2 – 3 day week, before they finally leave their job entirely.
Thinking seriously about what you want to do with your life, setting goals and most importantly, discussing these goals with your partner, if you have one, is a good start.
We have developed a number of tools to help with this planning process. There a 3 books covering Understanding the major issues, Health and Relationships, which are available on our Home Page. There’s also a free “Whole of life” retirement plan, which is available on our web site. If you’d like a free copy, go to our Home Page and click on the illustration with the caption “Download your free retirement plan”.