When you’re planning a vacation, you do legwork ahead of time. You buy a travel guide or look online for details about your destination; you comparison shop airfare, hotels, rental cars, etc.
Planning ahead is simply a sensible strategy that helps you avoid stress. But somehow, when it comes to retirement planning, people often overlook this type of preparation. Perhaps it is just too intimidating to plan for something that is so uncertain. Even discussing retirement can be confusing because your definition of an incredible retirement is unlikely to be the same as mine. Your notion of an “incredible retirement” may not even be the same as your spouse’s!
So what should you do to get started?
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Define what retirement means—for you, not someone else.
Retirement today is not the same as it was for your parents or grandparents, when most people worked for the same company for twenty or thirty years and then stop working altogether.
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Know your values.
Values are not the same as your goals. You need to identify and understand your core values. Ask yourself what’s important about money to you? Is it safety, security, freedom or something else entirely?
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Define your goals for the future.
This is where you start to put an action plan in place for your incredible retirement based on your goals, which stem from your values.
Ready to start preparing? We can help. Contact us to request a free consultation.