Create Your Retirement Plan
It’s never too late to create your retirement plan. Life is always changing and, hopefully, people are still growing in their interests, hobbies and activities. It’s never a bad idea to re-evaluate your current lifestyle and determine whether any changes should be made. That’s really what this website is all about. To look at all the possibilities and customize them to create the happiest retirement that you can.
Retirement is too good to let pass by without making sure you’re getting all the joy and happiness that you can out of it. We know from experience that our retirement is different from what we had first planned. We knew that we wanted to build our retirement home on a lake and do some traveling. Both of those activities turned out to be adventures of a lifetime in a very good way. We didn’t retire until we were both in our sixties and people thought we were crazy for taking up a construction project for our dream house in a new area that was about four hours from where we had lived for forty years. I have to admit that building a home from scratch was more work than we had thought but it was worth every minute of it. We love our home, which is now five years old, and we loved the design process and all the problems that had to be solved to build it on the plot of land we had acquired ten years before.
That’s part of the joy of retirement. We made it a new beginning every step of the way. I remember the old television show “Father Knows Best” (yes, I’m that old but keep in mind it was repeated for years) and I recall the last episode of the series when the father and the mother retired. They had bought a huge trailer and were going to travel around the country. I thought to myself how great an idea that was. My parents talked about doing that but were never able to do it. While I wanted no part of a trailer, I really wanted to live in a place where I could see mountains and, if possible, be near a lake. I happen to have married a saint who went along with my dream, and we designed our house together with all the things we had wished we had in our old home. It was quite a process and took more time and money than we had planned but we made it happen. We live in a community of about nine hundred homes and there is still some house building going on by people who are doing exactly the same thing. And even more people are buying existing homes and remodeling them to get what they want. Almost without exception, they are all happy they did it. When you create your retirement plan and follow it through to the end, there’s a sense of satisfaction that is hard to describe. I watch ducks and geese floating by on the lake and I still can’t believe we made this happen.
It's never too late to create your retirement plan.
The other thing that is different from our initial thoughts on retirement was the travel part. Yes, we do escape the Hudson Valley cold for the warmer temperatures elsewhere, but we completely underestimated how we were going to enjoy every aspect of our journey. We have thoroughly enjoyed Florida and the southeast, Texas, New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, Arizona and almost all of California but we have also expanded our horizons to other parts of the world. While we experience winter in the United States, the southern half of the world is in the middle of their summer and the Mediterranean is experiencing some of the most beautiful climate you can find. We haven’t just adjusted our retirement plan; we put it on steroids! When you create your retirement plan, build in some flexibility so that you can make some changes to adapt to what you experience. We know a couple who had exactly the opposite reaction. They didn’t like to travel as much as they thought they would. They didn't like to keep moving around. Their original plans did not include a winter home but that’s what ended up happening. We are very happy for them.
When you create your retirement plan allow for the fact that there may be some surprises. If that happens, be open to the changes that it might bring because you never know where it will lead. A going-in plan is extremely helpful because of the thought process you went through to create it. But I think it was General Eisenhower who said that a battle plan is useless, but planning is essential. Keep that in mind when you create your retirement plan. Keep changing and growing. It’s time to Enjoy Retired Life!
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