Painting A Picture

Clarifying your vision of retirement

Have you been thinking a lot lately about what the next phase of your life is going to look like? When you think about ‘retirement’, what vision comes to mind? How is your planning coming along?

If you are like the scores of Canadians who are on the verge of ‘retirement’, you have no doubt entertained these questions along with many others that may have entered your mind. Retirement was always a far-away light that shone dimly at the end of the work road. Now, it has become a beacon for many boomers who are ready to shift gears.

The retirement discussion is also coming at a time when many of us are contemplating the rest of our lives. Call it mid-life crisis, middle-aged angst or simply baby boomer enlightenment. There comes a point for most when they sit back and think about where they have been and what they have accomplished in their lives and then think about the future.

Redefining Retirement

I have always had trouble with the word ‘retirement’ and before we talk about how to plan for it we should look at how we think about the concept. Historically, it represented the “end of work” and the beginning of the last phase of life. To our parents, it meant that they were no longer as valuable in the workplace as they used to be and that it was time to enjoy their golden years. It also assumed that ‘work’ was a bad thing and that prolonged leisure was that light at the end of the tunnel.

While you may be ready to change careers or wind down your work or business involvement, do you really feel like you are entering the last chapter of your life—I don’t think so! So, you may call this transition retirement, but it certainly doesn’t have the same connotation for you as it did for your parents.

Perhaps the only common vision of retirement that most can agree on is that ‘retirement’ is that change in your life when you decide that, from this point on you can now do WHAT you want, WHEN you want and HOW you want.

That’s why most planning doesn’t reflect individual reality. We have made retirement into a financial issue by teaching that the key to a successful retirement is “having enough money to enjoy your life”. We have also made the assumption that retirement planning is leisure planning, as if you are embarking on a thirty-year long weekend.

Maybe it is time to “re-engineer” what retirement planning actually is. It has to reflect your individual life goals and consider those life areas that will be important to you in the future rather than just focusing on the financial aspects.

Building your own plan

Your ‘retirement plan’ is really a blueprint for how you want to live your future life. It is as individual as you are.

Someone once said that “if you don’t know where you are going, how will you know when you get there?” Before you do anything, you want to think about what it is that you really want to accomplish in this new life stage.

Most people plan retirement in a series of ‘episodes’ that they would like to have happen—the places they will go, the things they will do. That’s okay, but there are some other issues that will occur along the way that you want to consider as you create your vision for the future.

That may seem self-evident, but let me put it into perspective. What would an ideal week in retirement look like, say five years down the line? Not when you are traveling the world or basking on a beach—how about your day-to-day life at home?

There are 168 hours in a week and if you are not working you are going to have to fill in the 50-60 hours (or more) that work used to take up. How are you going to use your time? Will your activities be fulfilling, or simply ‘time-filling’?

A good way to look at life transitions at any stage but particularly at retirement is to consider the key areas of life that will be affected by the transition. That gives you a basic structure to create the life plans and strategies that will allow you to create a financial planning framework later.

There are seven of these life transition areas that you want to think about as you make your plans for ‘retirement’:

Your vision for the future
Your health
Your work
Your relationships
Your leisure
Your home
Your finances
What do you want to accomplish in each area? What changes do you foresee in the future? Your plan should reflect your views on all the important areas of your life in the short, medium and long-term.

Another way to look at creating a vision for the future is to decide on the values that you have that you want to reinforce in your retirement life. What is it that you want this life stage to mean, and what are the life goals that you can now strive for?

Your retirement vision should also consider the inevitable changes that happen and how they might affect your plans. Some of those you can’t anticipate and others such as getting older you accept with the secret thought that “that’s never going to happen to me!”

The more areas of your life you consider, the more you share your plans with those who will be part of your retirement and the more flexible your plans are, you will increase the ongoing effectiveness of your retirement plan.



At ScotiaMcLeod, we understand that wealth transcends money and represents the things in life that we would like to accomplish. As a Wealth Advisor, I work closely with my clients to help them create a clear vision of their retirement and then a financial strategy that is aligned with those goals. I think it would be beneficial for us to meet and discuss how we can work together to make sure you get the most out of this next stage of your life.