A Vision For What Happens Next

When we made the move to our current home, our plan, as vague as it was almost a decade ago, was to make this our retirement home.

We really weren’t thinking much about retirement back then. It seemed far enough away that we didn’t give it that much thought. Sure, I had financial plans and a notional idea as to when we might make the decision to retire but life continued without much focus on retirement. Until a few years ago. I had turned 57 and that was when I had originally thought I would be retired. I wasn’t quite ready then but I knew I wanted to transition away from a corporate career to retirement once I entered my 60s. More specifically, I did not want to work past 60 or 61.

It was around the time that I turned 58 that Lorraine and I spoke a bit more about our plans for retirement. And when I say plans, I mean just what were we going to do during that part of our lives? Lorraine was pretty blunt. She told me that I would go stir crazy if I just sat around the house all day. And I agreed with her. The idea of getting old hanging around the house did not seem very appealing.

The idea of traveling quickly came to mind. And, resurrecting a dream that we had many years ago of traveling around in a motorcoach, we decided that this would become a key part of our early retirement years, either full-time or extended-time, traveling in our coach for as long as we remained healthy.

Canada does not offer the same level of support for big rigs like our motorcoach and, as a consequence, it is more challenging to find the types of places where we would like to stay longer term when we are in Canada. So, we have decided that we will build a small house on a lot that can also accommodate our coach. We will become snowbirds with our coach during the winter months. We will do some travelling from our home base while we are in Canada.

These are all broad strokes mind you.

We have our house up for sale as we know that we need to downsize in retirement. Our house is simply way too large for the two of us. We have started to do some decluttering and simplification. We have a lot more to do on that front. And we ordered our coach last year and we started using it this summer. We love it and we can’t wait to get out and spend a lot more time exploring North America with it.

Retirement now seems like a very exciting place to be. It’s just not quite real for me yet.

We need something more specific in our plans for retirement. We need to answer a few basic questions like where will we set our home base while we are in Canada? What goals would we like to achieve during our retirement years, or at least in the first few years of retirement? How will we spend our days? What will we do to keep us healthy and engaged with life?

It is against this backdrop that we are currently thinking about our 30 goals for retirement.

I have some principles in mind. In no particular order:

• Keep healthy, emotionally and physically
• Be smart with our money — invest well and spend wisely
• Stay connected with our family
• Serve others well
• Keep growing mentally and spiritually
• Have fun
• Be adventurous

I have some work to do to get at those 30 goals.