When it comes to chasing retirement dreams, it can pay to take gentle steps
EXPLORING NEW-FOUND FREEDOM
Gerald Simpson dreamed of sailing around the world, and bought a 55-foot sailboat with which to fulfil that ambition as soon as he retired.
Although he had little sailing experience, and he and his wife had never sailed together, he enthusiastically planned their first major outing, a trip to Britain.
They got as far as the Bay of Fundy before she emphatically stated that the plan wasn’t going to work for her.
According to Michael Collymore, a certified financial planner in Markham, Ontario, experiences of this nature are too common. “People are often moving at 100 miles an hour through their careers, and move into retirement at the same speed. A wind-down period is essential.”
While it is ideal to spend time in the years preceding retirement testing dreams through extended holidays or sabbaticals, many retirees happily devote the first years of retirement to a time of experimentation. A comprehensive retirement plan allows retirees to move through this exploration from a position of strength, knowing the parameters of their financial wellbeing as they make decisions.
“I encourage people to begin by doing a cash flow analysis. In that process, they find out where their money is going now and can begin to map retirement spending. Ideally, people want to be in a situation in which the house is paid for, the children are on their own, the cars are paid for, emergency funds have been put aside and health care issues are addressed.
Then, it is a matter of maintaining the house, living expenses and lifestyle spending such as travel,” says Collymore.
“I have a lot of clients who approach retirement with the idea they won’t need much money to live on, and certainly, expenses such as travel to work disappear. But once people retire, they find other things to do with their time. Golf, for example, can be a considerable expense. On the other side of the equation, some people like to work part-time or do something completely different to supplement their income.”
Suzanne Armstrong, the founder and president of Life’s Next Steps, an organization that offers programs providing guidance and support to mid-life individuals, says, “To be successful in retirement, people need to be encouraged to dream big and to have a clear, well-defined vision in place for the future.
“We’ve developed certain strengths, skills from work and life strengths, which have served us well throughout life. They don’t change or go away when we retire. It is important we do things we’re good at and like to do.”
A satisfying transition begins, she says, with articulation of those strengths, dreams and values. “Values guide us and direct us in our whole life, and sometimes shift as we mature, taking on different emphasis and importance.”
Referring to Gerald Simpson’s experience, she says, “He knew he had a dream – but it wasn’t based on any of his strengths or even on things he liked to do. It most definitely wasn’t based on anything (his wife) liked to do. So it failed.”
It may be necessary to either enhance existing skill sets or adjust the dream. “A lot of people say, ‘I want to volunteer – I want to give back when I retire.’ But if they haven’t had a history of understanding what that’s all about, whether as a board member or cooking in a soup kitchen, they’re not going to be able to turn the switch on all of a sudden to figure out how to do it or be good at it.”
A realistic inventory and exploration process can also reveal new and sometimes thrilling possibilities.
“At the beginning of one of our workshops a few weeks ago, a woman described herself as ‘feeling untethered’ – directionless, scared, unsure what the workshop could offer. She was a successful freelance speechwriter, a wellknown person in her community.
She was afraid that retirement would mean being run over by her husband’s interests – she didn’t really know what she wanted to do.”
After going through the exercises, says Armstrong, the speechwriter concluded she had always wanted to be a pilgrim. “She wanted to keep writing and sharing information, and she loved food. She came up with the idea of visiting ‘slow food’ centres throughout Canada, writing articles from different spots, selling them to magazines in order to finance the trip, and then compiling all the articles into a book.
“You couldn’t have imagined a more delightful smile on her face.”
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