Retirement Goals

We have been to Walt Disney World so many times that we know pretty much what to expect. But there was a time, our first time, when we did not know what to expect and, for us, that experience was magical. We enjoyed it so much that we kept going back, year after year after year.

Within the next 12 – 18 months, Lorraine and I will enter a different gate, a gate that leads us into our golden years, a period of life called retirement. This will be our first time and we do not know what to expect. We hope that our experience during this part of our life will be magical.

If you search Google for retirement goals, you will receive a lot of hits, most of which focus on financial goals as if those are the only really important goals. Even then, the financial goals are wildly divergent. The financial services industry would like you to believe that it is necessary to build multi-million dollar portfolios to generate 100% of working income in retirement. Then there are those folks less optimistic who advocate working until you die. Retirement will never be a reality.

The truth is that you will have whatever you have in the way of financial resources at retirement. No more. No less. In our case, we will have pension income from my defined benefits pensions, investment income from our investment portfolio and income from our government pensions. At retirement, we will have no less than 13 sources of income to manage assuming that we do nothing in retirement to generate employment or business income.

How much will we need in retirement? How much is enough?

For us, the financial questions are no longer relevant. We have what we have and it will be enough.

The bigger question, now that retirement is getting so close, is to think through our vision for our retirement years. What will it look like? What will we do?

Lorraine and I have taken some actions to get ourselves ready for retirement. We have our house up for sale. We have purchased our coach, our home on wheels for when we are doing our extended travelling from whatever might pass as our home base in retirement. We have our financial models that look at how we will manage our financial assets during retirement.

But where do we start to set our goals for retirement?

This will be our first exercise:

We will start setting our retirement goals by creating a list of thirty goals on a sheet of paper. The first ten goals will be easy to identify, the next ten will be somewhat harder to recognize, and the last ten will hopefully help us discover our inner retirement dreams. We will each create a list of retirement goals independently, and then compare them afterwards.

I will let you know how that exercise turns out.