A Plan With Staying Power

To use an old cliché: “People don’t plan to fail; they fail to plan.” Today, the need for a financial retirement plan is obvious. You simply cannot retire in style and pursue your heart’s desire without an adequate level of financial resources, and to accumulate such resources, you need to plan ahead. However, too many of us neglect an aspect of planning that’s equally—yes, equally—important: the emotional side, or the part that I call your life plan. “I have come to the conclusion,” writes retirement expert Michael Stein, author of The Prosperous Retirement: Guide to the New Reality, “that more retirements will fail for non-financial reasons than for financial reasons.”

The bottom line: in order to fully enjoy this new phase of life, you’ve got to prepare emotionally as well as financially, and these two elements of planning must be viewed as two parts of a whole. Too many planning approaches address one or the other, leaving many retirees “all dressed up with no place to go.” They concentrated hard on building a nest egg but neglected to think about what they wanted to do with that nest egg.

Think about it. You’ve worked all your life. Then, the day arrives when you walk out the office door for the last time. Suddenly, the days stretch before you. You’ve got nowhere to be; Monday is the same as Saturday. If you haven’t thought about what it will mean to stop working, how that will affect you, and how you’d like to fill your days with enjoyment and meaning, there’s a good chance you’ll be bored and confused. Not surprisingly, many people in this position end up sinking into a dull routine that ironically leaves them longing for work.

At the other end of the spectrum are retirees, including many baby boomers, who have great dreams for retirement but limited financial resources for realizing those dreams. Instead of taking that month-long tour of the Alps, they’re stuck taking the virtual tour on their computer at home and thinking about what might have been. This is because they did not plan well financially.

Among our retired clients, the most satisfied are not the ones with the most money but rather the ones who knew what they wanted to do in retirement and were able to use their retirement financial plans to implement their retirement life plans. These work together as a total vision for the retirement they’ve worked so hard to earn.