Can you envision what your retirement years may look like? Do you see yourself traveling the world, living in your ideal location, spending time with your loved ones, or setting out on a new second career? Before you can start a retirement plan, you need to know what you want your retirement to be.
Developing Your Vision
To gain a sense of clarity around what your retirement vision looks like, think of retirement from a crawl, walk, and run perspective. Without a vision, you cannot develop the necessary plan to help guide you to where you ultimately want to go.
Here are a few steps to help you from crawling to running in your retirement journey. Be mindful to take your time and thoroughly think through what you see your retirement as being. This is one time when it is good to think selfishly!
- Start with a clean sheet of paper and begin to write down the ideas that come to mind about what your ideal retirement would be. Think big; remember, the only limit right now is you.
- Take your ideas and break them down into more specific details. For example, you may want to retire to a warmer climate, but are you planning to live there year-round? Do you plan on maintaining two residencies, and where exactly will that future destination be? A more specific idea may be that you plan to live in the Outer Banks in North Carolina with an ocean-view home during the winter and spring months while residing in a smaller condo in Michigan during the summer and fall months due to family commitments.
- Once you have your ideas on paper, decide what retirement objectives are most important to you and prioritize accordingly.
I hope you can see that there is a lot of work to be done even before you consider financial figures and asset management strategies regarding retirement planning. Although TAMMA can help facilitate the initial steps outlined above, it begins with you. We aim to help you reach those objectives by planning and managing your investable assets.
The Final Step
The fourth step is where working with TAMMA could help bring some of your ideas into reality. We would begin the process of analyzing and identifying what it might take to accomplish your retirement objectives, which would likely include the following;
- Determining the costs involved
- The amount of time it would take
- How much you would need to save
- The probability of success
And as you go through your working years and need to be flexible with your retirement objectives, there is no need to worry. You can pivot your retirement plan to accommodate whatever life may throw your way. Once your financial data is clearly outlined, you can create a framework and roadmap that works best for you and your situation, thus helping to make your retirement objectives a reality.
