PLANNING AHEAD

A recent perusal of Books in Print revealed that there are somewhere in the neighborhood of 350 books on retirement currently available. Well over 50% of these deal exclusively with the financial aspects of retirement – and I suspect that there will be even more on that topic as retirees and wannabe retirees start trying to climb out of the financial hole most fell into in 2008-2009.

Finances are certainly a critical element in retirement planning, and I intend to address that issue in future blogs. But as a starter, I wanted to talk about a topic that most of us think about when facing the transition to retirement – What am I going to do with all that time I’ve got on my hands?

A major emphasis in my blog is going to be how important it is to begin thinking about that long before we’re eligible for Medicare. I believe that the ideal way should look something like the graph above.

Line A is your “Real job”. Line B is what you want to spend more time doing in retirement. Well before you start downsizing your real job, you should be learning more about and spending more time in that activity (or activities) you want to do after you retire. At some point the lines will cross, and you will be spending more time doing the new, fun stuff.

So. . .how do you figure out what you want Line B to be? There are lots of ways, but one of the best suggestions is in Ernie Zelinski’s book, How to Retire Happy, Wild, and Free, where he describes the “Make-A-Life” Tree. You make 3 lists:

1) Activities that turn you on now
2) Activities that turned you on in the past (but you have stopped doing)
3) New Activities you have thought of doing (but haven’t done)

This is just one of the many great ideas in Zelinski’s book, which is without question one of the very best ever written about how to retire. Check it out.