Retirement is not just about reaching a number—a certain age or a certain account balance. The idea of retirement has changed; whether people are working into their seventies or retiring at fifty, working part-time in retirement or rotating in and out of the workforce, a retirement plan needs to be more than a mechanical calculation of how much you need.
At Advice First, we go beyond the numbers to also help clients understand what they want their retirement to look like—how to maximize their return on life.
While retirement planning is a key component of our Life Centered Planning process, we also offer retirement coaching as a stand-alone service for those approaching this stage of life, using tools and resources to help you explore:
your optimal balance between different facets of retirement (work, leisure, connecting and renewal), and how they compare to your significant other’s expectations
your vision for retirement—are you retiring TO something, not just FROM something?
how you’d like to spend an ideal week in retirement, using not only your resources, but also your time in a way that gets you the best life possible
potential pitfalls in retirement—are there any lifestyle and economic benefits of working that you’ll miss, and how can you prepare for them?
The EPIC Retirement
Do you have a clear vision of how you want to spend your time in retirement? This video describes four keys to ensuring your retirement years are a time where your mind, body, and spirit thrive, not just survive. Let go of preconceived notions about retirement and consider the opportunities that come with seeing retirement in an entirely new light.
How do we do this? Here are our tools:
Retirement Observations
We've all observed other people, friends, family, co-workers, experience some kind of retirement. Using this tool we look to identify common traits you've observed of those people, both positive and negative. Everyone has learned some valuable lessons from these observations, and we want to hear about it.
Your Retirementality
Using this tool, we can help figure out what kind of balance will be right for you in the future between 4 different facets. These are Work, Leisure, Connecting, and Renewal. It is important to understand where both you and your significant others sit on this profile. Often couples head into retirement expecting their partner to have the same life expectations, but are later disappointed to discover they don't. The Retirementality will help you understand how you are wired, and provide clarity for expectations in the future.
Retirement Visioning
By going through this exercise, we want you to envision what retirement really looks like to you. It starts with a question. 'What advice would your 100-year old self give you today?' While the exercise might seem simple, we want to ensure that you are not just retiring FROM something, but retiring TO something. One of the biggest reasons retirements 'fail' is a lack of vision going forward.
Ideal Week
How you spend your time in retirement includes family, friends, community, leisure, health, purpose and meaning. By using this tool, we help to visualize how your time will be spent, and build out your ideal week in retirement. This takes pieces from the other tools to ensure you are using not only your resources, but also your time in a way that is getting you the best life possible.
Retirement Worksheet
The retirement worksheet tool gives you the ability to determine what the lifestyle and economic benefits of work actually are to you, and what types of benefits might be lost when that time comes. Using these findings, we can become aware of some potential pitfalls for the future, and determine ways to avoid them. Most people believe economic motivators are the biggest factors related to work, but in reality, we find that lifestyle motivators tend to be just as important, if not more so.
Want to learn more?
We’re here to help! Book a call or a meeting with our advisors today and get started on planning your return on life.