A Place to Settle Down With

When you are looking down the road at that new lifestyle of retirement, there is a whole new way of life to be anticipated. And that is the fun of retirement planning because, as they say, anticipation is half of the fun. And part of the preparation for retirement is looking at various retirement facilities and retirement communities that you might look to call home.

It’s appropriate to use the term “retirement community” because when you are considering selling your home and moving to an assisted care facility or a senior apartment, community is just as important to you as the food and the layout of your space. So when you start that search process, it’s good to know what questions to ask and how to evaluate different retirement communities against each other.

Anytime you go to “interview” the administration of a retirement community, they are going to put their best foot forward. But that’s ok because you want to know what their bragging rights are all about. So in addition to discussing price and amenities, make sure you include community activities as part of the things you ask about and use to evaluate the community. One of the big advantages of moving to a senior center is that you can have a more social lifestyle then living in your home by yourself. So the retirement center must be the kind of place that facilitate a lot of social interaction so you can make friends and get out and have fun.

The layout and how the residents are interacted with by staff make a big difference for how well people get out of their apartments and enjoy their living arrangements. Take the tour of the place but don’t just look the carpet and the views out of the display apartment windows. Look at how many people are out and about, how much informal communication is going on and if public spaces are available and in use on a daily basis. That is something that cannot be “staged” and you will be able to tell if the people are having fun and enjoying each other at the retirement community.

Of course there are the “brass tacks” questions you will need to go through when interviewing a possible new place to live. The facility has to be within your price range so they should be forthright about costs. But even if you can afford what they charge, there has to be value for the money. Look at the facility both for what is being offered and how well they seem to be able to fulfill their promises. Look at the physical arrangements. How old is the facility and does it seem to be in good repair?

Make it a point to talk to various staff members during your stay. If the person assigned to host you lets you talk to residents and staff but they must be present, that might indicate that they are putting on a show for you and not letting you know the real story of the facility. Make arrangements to be “cut loose” to wander the halls, talk to residents and visit staff on a surprise basis. If the staff is irritated by your attempts to communicate, always busy or cold and hostile, that is a culture issue that you don’t want to be part of your new lifestyle.

A real test of a retirement community might come in giving them a test drive. If the facility owners have a guest apartment and they offer to let you stay for a few days to just sample life in the community, that is a strong statement of faith that you will find everything to your liking. By living amongst the people, you have lots of chances to eat with the residents, begin making friends and find out the real scoop on whether this is a good place to live or not.

By coming up with a strategy for looking at different retirement centers to find out what they are really all about, you will do a much better job of evaluating retirement communities. And it’s worth the effort to dig a bit beneath the surface because if this place wants to be your new home, they must be able to make you retirement life happy, social and fun. Because that’s the way it should be.

Retirement Starts Young

It isn’t too surprising that the time when we really start thinking about retirement and planning for it is middle age. Perhaps it is when we have our lifestyles pretty well defined, perhaps the career is where you want it to be and the kids are here and growing up that you start looking down the road to the future. Perhaps it is looking toward the future in terms of insurance, planning for college and other issues such as this also gets your mind moving on how you will be ready when retirement gets here.

But if we were able to step back above our lives, the best time to start preparing for retirement is not the middle age years. Retirement planning experts tell us that if young people in their twenties or even teens can start putting a little bit back toward retirement, the rewards when they reach their golden years will be phenomenal. If a youth in his early twenties or teens were to just put one percent of what they make back, and that money stayed in some form of investment vehicle that would grow into a retirement account, the growth between the time of investment and retirement at 60 or 65 can be explosive even at a modest interest rate.

Unfortunately, few young people are looking that far ahead when they are in their early adult lives. That is a time when the transition from teen years to family life is pretty all consuming. So it might be the responsibility of parents and older advisors to help youth see the value of starting to work on their retirement savings well in advance so they have a well developed program when their retirement years come along.

One of the best places for a young person to start their retirement program is with the 401k or retirement benefits at their job. Now, in the last decade, many businesses have eliminated retirement benefits where the company pays for the retirement. But if the young person works for a company that offers 401K, they can set aside a percentage of their income and it will be put into a retirement fund before taxes. Moreover, often the company will match the funds up to dollar for dollar and the company will manage the investment of the funds as well.

The outcome is a healthy and rapidly growing fund that starts out with an immediate doubling of the invested funds and then grows steadily over the years as more is put into the fund with each paycheck. The young worker gets used to the retirement money coming out so they adjust their budget to live without it. And without giving retirement much more thought than that, within a few decades, the 401K can evolve into a very impressive retirement account to be sure.

If you are a young person and you are considering if you might think about starting a retirement account, congratulations. You are one of just a few people who have the foresight to think about retirement this early in life. And by starting now, you take advantage of the thing that is your greatest asset – time. Because if you only put a little bit back, that can grow and grow and grow and become a sizeable retirement nest egg for you and your spouse even if he or she is the spouse off in your future.

The Who, What, When, Where and Why of Retirement

In the newspaper business, when a reporter wants to find out all about a case, they always ask the big five questions which are who, what, when, where and why. If the reporter can get these basic questions answered about any story, that is considered good research.

We can use the same approach as we begin to process the idea of retirement planning. It would be a mistake to only look at retirement planning as strictly a financial step. If all retirement consisted of was a change to where you get your money, that would be one level of change. But retirement also brings with it big lifestyle changes and changes to your priorities and how you use your time. So it’s a good idea to prepare for all of the changes retirement brings by asking the big five questions.

Who will you be retiring with is a very important question because your mode of living is going to change in every way imaginable. That man or woman who has been part of your life for so many decades will now become central to every move you make when retirement puts you together every day all day. So you should think that through and decide how you want to arrange your time so both of you still have your own interests, activities and friends but you can also enjoy a new closeness that retirement affords you.

What you will be doing with your time is a huge question as you walk away from the working world. Retirement is a great time to start enjoying those hobbies that never got enough time. You can catch up on your reading, write the great American novel or take classes to learn to paint or do woodworking. See retirement as a time when the sky is the limit for you to explore your creative side.

When you retire is a big factor on how much of your retirement savings you have to have ready by a certain time. For many, dipping into the retirement savings can be postponed for years. If you get to the point that you can collect Social Security and still make a fair amount of money part time or performing some cottage industry job, you might be able to keep your retirement savings growing even for the first five to ten years of retirement. And that means a longer more prosperous retirement time frame for you and your spouse as well.

Where will you live once you settle into the place you want to call your retirement bungalow. If you plan to sell the house and buy a condo or move into an assisted living center, there is a lot of preparation for both of those steps. There isn't time like the present to begin that retirement planning by getting the house ready to sell and by getting out and researching the best retirement living options for you to consider.

Why retire is more than just a philosophical question. You may be retiring because you got to a certain age and it is required of you. But to enter retirement with a good attitude, it’s good to find your own motivations for wanting to scale back your responsibilities and enjoy some leisure time as a senior citizen. And if retirement means more time for hobbies, chances to travel or enjoy time with your spouse or greater access to those sweet grandbabies, those are great reasons to enter the life of a retired person.

But the one question we did not list that may be more than all the rest is the “how” of retirement. How you go about moving from a life of working, selling the house and getting settled in a completely new world, perhaps with new friends and new objectives for living is a major challenge for anyone especially if you have been a productive member of the business or working world for many decades.

There are a lot of levels to the “how question”. That is why in a lot of ways the period of time leading up to retirement and doing retirement planning can be as active as retirement itself. But it’s good you are getting started now because by being prepared, your transition to retirement will be smooth and as painless as possible for such a big change of life.

Turning that Mortgage Around

Your house that you bought so many years ago represents one of the biggest investments of your life. By the time you approach retirement, if you have stuck with it, you may well have that house paid off. And with appreciation, that home may be worth twice or three times what you paid for it and you have all the equity from those years of house payments. Therefore, in addition to the joy you have had living in that house and raising your family there, that house is also can be a big part of your retirement planning as well.

It used to be that to take advantage of that equity when you enter retirement, you either had to sell the house and go live in a nursing home or retirement community or you took out a new mortgage borrowing against the equity and you find yourself paying huge interest payments all over again.

But a new kind of mortgage called the “reverse mortgage” is now available so a senior citizen who is preparing for retirement can begin to realize some of that equity as capital and not have to take on a loan payment or move out of their home. This innovative new program allows you to set up the equivalent of a home equity loan but instead of getting a huge lump sum, you can have the equity sent to you in the form of monthly payments so the equity of your home can actually become part of your monthly budget to supplement Social Security or other retirement funds.

What is great about the reverse mortgage type of financial vehicle is that you are never required to pay back the loan of the money that is based on your equity. The only time that loan amount would be required of you would be if you moved, sold the house or passed away in which case the sale of the house would realize the equity to retire the loan. In other words, if you take out $100,000 from your home for medical costs or just to finance a comfortable retirement living, you are not called upon to pay back that money and you can continue to live in the house for as long as you want to.

This is a phenomenal arrangement that seems tailor made for senior who want to enjoy their retirement years without financial worries and do so living in the house where they raised their children and a home that has become so precious to them. For children of a retiring parent, the reverse mortgage is a godsend because mom or dad can stay in their own home where they are happiest. And if they can keep the old homestead, the whole family will continue to enjoy coming to visit there, seeing the grandkids run and play in the same yard they grew up in and having holidays there as well.

Like some of the best programs for retiring persons, the reverse mortgage was originally put together by the US. Department of Housing and Urban renewal. It isn’t often that the government gets something right but they hit one out of the ball park with the reverse mortgage. It is a program and provides federally insured funds to seniors so they can supplement their income in a safe way that allows them to use the equity of their home for their retirement comfort without ever having to give up that home. And because the money coming out of a reverse mortgage is technically a loan, you never have to pay taxes on that money which is another big financial blessing.

The reverse mortgage is an option worth considering as part of retirement planning. It gives seniors one more option for keeping their homes. And that is good for everybody.

Planning for That Final Moment

There is a phrase people use when referring to estate planning and all the things you do as a responsible adult so when you get into retirement years, you don’t have to worry about those things. That is because one of the big objectives of retirement planning is to put all of your “affairs in order” as they say so if something came up, your kids would not have to deal with it. So you go through the checklist and make arrangements for your will and your DNR or “do not resuscitate” so the medical people will know what to do in the event you cannot be brought to consciousness.

But one level of preparation for your final years of a very full life that you may not have decided about is funeral preparations. Many funeral homes sell packages where you can pay for your casket and much of the funeral expenses well in advance. This is very appealing because you can think ahead about how you would like the funeral to go and select the casket and make arrangements so there is less guesswork for your family and loved ones if the moment comes up too quickly.

That is the real appeal of preplanning all aspects of what might happen when your final moments come. You don’t want to leave your children to have to try to figure out your life insurance, your estate issues, your will and your funeral if your demise comes along suddenly. Most of these preparations are pretty cut and dried and you want all the paperwork in order, legal and the person assigned to resolve your estate informed and legal so there is no time lost on getting things the way they should be if the moment were to come.

The big step of pre-buying your funeral plot, casket and paying for the funeral in advance is something to give some serious thought to. For one thing, you must be absolutely sure you are in the town where you will want to be buried. Many times later in life, a retired person wants to pack up and move to where the kids are living. That is one of the good things about begin retired and relatively unencumbered by a lot of possessions. If you are living in an assisted living center, the move is just not that difficult. So you don’t want to own property, even if it’s just a burial plot and have to deal with transferring all of that paperwork to another town if you do move with your kids.

But the compelling reason not to put money into a funeral arrangement package is that funeral homes are not great at managing those funds. There have been plenty of stories come out of late of mismanagement of funds buy funeral homes. Or if the company owning the funeral home is bought, many times the new company will not honor your contract with the previous owners and your relatives find this all out just when they least need to hear about problems.

A much better option is to take the same money you would have put into funeral arrangements and put it into a trust set aside just for this purpose. You can name who you want to have access to the trust and even write out in specific detail what you want the money used for and how you want the funeral to go. That form of living will or ethical will gives your relatives the resources they need to conduct your affairs and the directions you want them to have. But they have the flexibility to pick the funeral home and buy the plot that seems right at the time. The money can accrue interest and it is secure because it is still owned by the family right up until it is needed.

The desire you have to get your final arrangements arranged is a good one. But thinking through some of the problems that can come up if you do too much prearranging gives you the wisdom to make the right choices so you can enter your retirement years knowing that everything is arranged when and if, God forbid, the moment of your departure comes along.

The Many Levels of Retirement Planning

The concept of retirement planning brings up the image of you working with your investment counselor or setting up your 401K so you have adequate financial resources when you retire. And it is true that a big part of being ready to retire involves being ready financially to be able to step out of the work world and start to take life easier.

But just as life is not just about making money, retirement is about so much more than having the money not to work. Preparation for retirement also means preparing to live a simpler life, preparing to become a “senior citizen” and a grandparent and preparing to look at life differently.

Your health care is going to be an important issue in your retirement years. As you enter retirement, you may be strong as an ox and active and full of health and life. But any of us can fall prey to poor health or accidents. And if your employer from whom you retired does not extend your health care insurance for you to continue your coverage past your employment, you should make other plans. You can continue the same coverage that you had under the Cobra system but that can get pretty costly and dip into your finite retirement savings pretty significantly. Medicare can be helpful too. But to be perfectly comfortable that you have coverage, look to Medicare supplement insurance so you maintain the same quality of care in retirement that you have now in the working world.

Don’t just limit your retirement planning to your money. Your retirement will be a time of a big change of lifestyle and a change to your values and how you spend your time as well. You will have more time on your hands and studies show that those who enter retirement without “an agenda” can become adrift in all that time and that isn’t healthy. Human beings are doers so even though you may no longer be working for a living, find ways to be productive and make a difference in your community. You can start finding those opportunities long before retirement so when you finally step out of the work world, expanding those hobbies and volunteer efforts is as natural as can be.

In addition to the change of where you spend your time each day, you may have even a bigger change in where you live ahead for you in retirement. Many times people who step into their retirement years find that maintaining the house where you raised the kids is just not necessary and more work than it worth. Selling the home and using the equity to finance a leisurely retirement life is a great way to go. But you should start early both preparing the home for sale and preparing the family that “grandma and grandpa’s house” is going away.

In addition, where you go to live is something that can be great fun to dream about and doing some research on just the right place. You may choose to rent a small place in an older part of town and enjoy a whole new lifestyle in that setting. Or you might go for a high-rise condo with a view of the river or a nice quiet apartment in a retirement oriented apartment complex where you and other retirees can explore this new world together.

Above all it’s important to embrace the retired lifestyle with the enthusiasm and excitement that you might greet any new opportunity. Don’t let being retired mean just not working. In fact, go through the mental and emotional exercises of putting the working world behind you and redefining yourself in this new role. You are retired now and you are a senior citizen and maybe even a grandparent.

These are not negative things. There is a strong role for grandma and grandpa in society and in your family. And the world takes great joy in a senior citizen who embraces that time of their life and sets out to be the best senior citizen they can be. If you predetermine that this is the kind of retired person you are going to be, that attitude will propel you past that sudden change of life shock and get your retired life off in running in an exciting way that will lead to many happy and fun times in your life of leisure as a retired person.

Retirement Looks Different Through a Woman’s Eyes

The classic picture of a couple retiring and the wife cashing in on the great retirement planning of the husband is a pretty picture for sure but it doesn’t always line up very well with reality. For thousands of women, seeing the retirement years ahead mean you will be making plans for retiring yourself. But even if you have a husband, it’s a good idea to look at retirement with the idea of what if you have to face it alone. It’s a sad statistic but women outlive men in general. So if you get to retirement or just before it and you find yourself facing that next transition of life, retirement looks a lot different through a woman’s eyes than when a man does the same preparation.

Saving up for retirement is something that is at least as important if not more important for women as it is for men preparing for the same time of their lives. And since women typically earn somewhat less than men during their careers, sitting down and thinking through the formula of how much to set aside for retirement should be a carefully considered act and one that is repeated frequently over the years to make sure you are on track.

This is especially true if your work is not in the conventional world of big business. If you make a good living running your own antique shop or as an entrepreneur as many women do, you have to think about your retirement planning yourself because you will not have the advantages of a company sponsored 401k plan to cash in on. So as soon as you feel you know that the way you make your living is not gong to change, start your saving and investing immediately.

On the other side of that equation, it might be worth taking a look at getting into a corporate situation entirely for the insurance and the retirement benefits. While there is often a “glass ceiling” in the business world, if you know why you are there which is to build a strong retirement planning package, you can leverage your position in the business world shrewdly and not have the stresses that many men endure in that same setting.

Above all, make it your private passion to learn all you can about investments and ways you can build your retirement portfolio. With the advent of internet trading, often a woman can start with very little and with some careful investing and conservative stock purchases, build up an impressive portfolio that can serve as an excellent retirement vehicle down the road.

Just as you may have done if you spent your working years in a family situation, you should look at how your money is used not only for the immediate value but as an investment down the road. It is often convenient to live in an apartment or rental property because when you are a working woman, upkeep on a home is a nuisance. And if you don’t like mowing the lawn and all of the other overhead of a home, that purchase may not fit your lifestyle.

Nonetheless, home ownership is one of the smartest ways to go about building equity in advance of retirement. You might look at buying a house as a big step toward financial independence in your retirement years. The way the tax laws are structured, you will get a lot of financial value out of home ownership and it can serve as the basis for further financial planning once your ownership of the home is secured. So take a second look at home ownership in a house with a yard and all of the trappings. If the overhead is too much to take on, you can often bring in renters or roommates who may enjoy that aspect of living in a house and you can cut them some slack on the rent if they take care of upkeep of the place.

By beginning to plan early in life for retirement later, women can do just as well as men in preparing for this important part of life. But you have to face the responsibilities of retirement planning squarely and not procrastinate on starting your investment and retirement portfolios far enough ahead that they will pay off later. If you do, you too can enjoy a peaceful and prosperous retirement years.

How Much Will You Need to Retire?

There are levels of preparedness when it comes to looking down the road at your retirement and how much you will need when you get there. The basic level of retirement planning is to sign up for your 401k at work, support legislation to keep Social Security intact, buy some life insurance and let it go at that. This system will work so there is reason to call this bad retirement planning. After all, if you began preparing for retirement in your early adult life and stayed with it, you will have a resource to retire on and that’s a good thing.

But there is a way to take it to the next level and that is to actually start putting some flesh and bones on your vision of your retirement and get a feel not only for the fact that you will retire but how you expect to live in retirement. Very often, we have idealistic visions of retirement life based on media images or the fantasy life of living in luxury and having little to do but golf in the morning and drink campaign and eat caviar all afternoon. So if you can get a realistic view of what you have as your expectations for retirement, you can start making adjustments to your retirement planning package right now.

Start with how you see your retirement lifestyle working. If you want little more than a manageable retirement apartment, a cat and the chance to knit or watch ESPN without interruption, that is a fairly modest retirement lifestyle to prepare for. But other people have adventure and high living in their retirement dreams. So if world travel or living in a luxury setting is part of that dream, only one person is going to make that dream a reality and that is you.

An exercise that is fun and eye opening is to detail every aspect of your dream life in retirement. Start by picturing your living conditions. Include your diet needs and wants as well as any entertainment and recreational needs you expect to be a part of retirement. For example, if you know you will want to go on long fishing adventures several times a year, you will need a RV and the finances to support taking off for the most scenic spots within driving distance to kick back and enjoy the fishing. So include the physical and financial needs for that lifestyle in this “detail” step of retirement planning.

You can complete the exercise by getting to such a level of detail that you could go out and price the dream in today’s dollars. Then when you take your “dream retirement shopping list” out into the open markets and use retail locations, catalogs and internet sites to actually find out how much it would cost to have that retirement today, that will shed a lot of light on your retirement preparations that you are doing.

Now, the actual cost of those different components will be much higher when you actually get to the point of retirement. You could try to factor in inflation and make those kinds of adjustments but don’t play with the formula so much that you get the idea that it’s impossible and give up. However, another factor that offsets the inflation factor is that your retirement life will be less expensive then your current lifestyle. Your daily needs may not be as demanding. If you sell your house after paying off the mortgage, your monthly expenses will go way down and you will have a significant surge of retirement capital that will come from the sale of the house. And you are not raising kids, putting them through college or having to support the lifestyle and wardrobe of a working person. All of these things offset the inflation issue.

A New Life – A New Career

For many the idea of retirement comes with the automatic translation that it means that you will stop working is just not acceptable. For many, retirement from work is equivalent with no longer living. If you have been a productive worker all of your life and someone asked you what your dream retirement might look like, you might respond “to work” because you may be one of those people for whom work is what gives meaning and purpose to life.

It isn’t fair for us to impose the same standards of retirement on everyone. To say that to enjoy your golden years, you must take up fishing, start sleeping until noon, sit in a rocker and watch the day go by and gradually turn into a senior citizen would to many be the same as sentencing them to life in prison without parole. So for many it’s very possible that working would be the thing that would make your retirement meaningful.

Still others must continue to work into their retirement years because they did not or could not prepare for retirement. Whatever the situation, there are some adjustments that should be made to shift to a retirement career that you can continue to do well into your senior years.

You can get a running start on your retirement planning if you find that a career change is appropriate later in life. Many times we do find that the career we are in may either be changing so fast that it’s hard to keep up, it’s too physically demanding when you are older or in some other way that job has become a “young man’s game”. If that has happened to you, you can get a jump start on finding a career that you can stick with well into your retirement years, that career can be an income generator that might never go away.

It is not at all uncommon for men in their later years to start a new career. Perhaps you just want a career where you can use the creative side of you and one that can be a natural transition into retirement. Perhaps you reached the maximum vesting of your retirement account with a job you held for decades so you can “retire” from that job with full benefits and funding and still start another career that you can take on into retirement and keep doing as you enjoy the fruits of retirement as well.

Many times the skills and knowledge you learned in the business world during your first career can transition you into a lucrative consulting career late in life. One way to explore this option is to think of the venders who sold goods and services to you when you were in your previous career and contact them to see if you might now represent their services as a former satisfied customer. If you had specialized knowledge and training in how to use their software or a technical product, that training which your former employer paid for can now transition into an exciting career as a sales representative or sale support for the very companies who once had you as a customer.

The internet can also open up worlds of money making opportunities that you can use to land work or sell something you may have made by setting up your own web site and learning how to promote yourself online. Many cottage industries have taken off and been hugely successful just getting what you do out into cyberspace. For example, if you are talented at making beautiful artistic pottery, you can create a line of pots that is perfect for sale over the internet. You can work with a skilled internet web developer and marketer to get your product out on the internet and before long, you might have more orders than you know what to do with all flying out through your web site which is collecting the money and filling your back account up with all the profits.

The ways you can create a new business in your retirement years are only limited by your imagination. And once you have a good new career going that you can continue well into your retirement years, you won’t have many of the worries other retired people have. You can enjoy the freedoms of a retirement lifestyle and made plenty of money at the same time. And that’s a great combination.

Getting Rid of the Stuff

One of the things that often keeps us from mentally crossing that bridge into retirement is the sheer volume of “stuff” that you have accumulated during a life of raising kids and just buying things over several decades of family life. If the kids have moved out but you and your spouse are living in the home you have occupied for years, the layers and layers of accumulation can be tremendously intimidating to think about going through and deciding what to keep and what to give away.

Now there is no reason not to go ahead with plans to retire from your job and start that lifestyle as soon as your finances are able to let you do that and you are ready to step out of the working world. But for many of us, the real transition of becoming fully retired happens when we pare down our possessions, sell the family estate and move into a quaint bungalow, retirement apartment or assisted living center to begin enjoying a life of fewer responsibilities and a lot more fun.

The first step of taking on the challenge of how to attack the mountains of stuff is to get a rough inventory for what you have and what you can get rid of. You can start on this quest as early as you feel ready to put your retirement planning on the front burner. Many start on it as soon as they enter the “empty nest” phase of their life and the kids are gone and you can begin to convert their rooms into usable space for you and start getting their stuff out of the house as well.

So your kids are the first line of defense or rather of offense of attacking the sheer volume of stuff you own. Now is the time to start the inheritance process early. There is no doubt many things in your family possessions that the kids cherish from their upbringing in your home and that you will want to pass along to them. So let them know that over the next year or so, you are going to expect them to come along and get the stuff they want before you sell the house.

This can be a progressive process. If the kids live far off, you can use visits for the holidays to go through closets and box and ship their precious memories and mementos from their childhood years so those things can start living at their homes and not at yours. This is a big step toward getting rid of all the stuff.

Next you should start to think about the amount of space you will have in your new space and what you are going to need and use regularly when living in that smaller living quarters. Be pragmatic here so you are only looking at things from a usability point of view. On your first pass, many things will make the cut to be saved because they are either useful or nostalgic or both.

But also begin to go through the house room by room and separate things into “keep’, “give away” or “trash”. You will find lots of stuff you can give to Good Will or to charities which gives those things a new life and you a small tax write off for next year. But be brave about throwing away things that just have no real value any more. Remember, if you don’t get rid of it, you are going to be living with it for another twenty years and that is what we are trying to get away from. By giving yourself some time to get ready to move into the smaller space, this process of paring down the possessions can be rewarding and fulfilling and a good next step into your next phase of life.

Scaling Back the Farm

When you are in the middle of your years of raising a family, there is nothing like owning your own home to make that experience rewarding. So if you bought a home with the conventional yard, fence, neighbors, dog and all of the trappings of suburbia, you no doubt have many happy memories that you had “back at the farm” as you may have called it. Many people even go so far as to name their home something like “Happy Acres” to give their homestead even more personality and add that sense of ownership to it.

Probably to your kids, the house you raised them in will forever to your home and the idea of anyone else living in it is heresy of the worst kind. But as you begin to move toward retirement age, you may see the value in selling that home and getting into something smaller, cozier and with less overhead.

Retirement doesn’t always mean moving into a nursing home or retirement center. You may have many happy years ahead of you where you are plenty able to get around and have no need of “assisted living”. But selling the house as you enter into your retirement years makes a lot of sense for a lot of good reasons.

For one thing, you may have that house paid off and there may be a lot of equity in that home that you can use to get into a cozy little condo or apartment and have plenty of money left over to pad your retirement savings or afford a bit of travel with your spouse. If your home can finance some of the trips you have been dreaming of all these years, that is a good payback for being so careful with your money during your working years.

You can take a one time tax exemption that we all are allowed to use which permits you to sell the house and not have to pay taxes on the proceeds even if you don’t sink the money into another house. That means that all of that equity money is sitting there waiting for you to put it to work. While you cannot sell your memories, if the house isn’t serving your needs as a family any more, why bother with it?

Many times when you get done raising the kids and no longer are tied down to a job, it might be time for you and your spouse to get out there and enjoy life and travel. Retirement is often a time to get rid of a lot of your material possessions and get lose to get out and enjoy your freedom and see some of the world that you couldn’t do when you were raising children. But if you live in a small place that is not difficult to lock up and walk away from, you have the freedom that you always dreamed of when you thought of the word “retirement”.

Another great reason to get out of your house as you move toward retirement is that a house with a yard and all of the other trappings of ownership is a constant ownership problem. You are responsible to fix the fence, get the plumbing fixed, grow a yard, a garden and keep up the house year in and year out. If you sell the place and rent or move into a smaller place such as a condo, a huge amount of that maintenance if not all of it disappears. Now when the appliances break down, just call “the super” and let them deal with it. You deserve to have those worries taken off of your back. That is what retirement is all about.

So getting rid of the homestead might be a great idea for your retirement planning. But be prepared for the move and the work that getting the old place ready will entail. You didn’t clutter that place up in a week and you won’t get out of it that fast either. But by going through your stuff and streamlining your life now, that is something your kids won’t have to do later. And when you are moved out and another young family is getting started in your old homestead, you can congratulate yourself on a great move to put yourself in a perfect place to enjoy a happy and fun retirement with the love of your life.

Helping Your Employees Retire

You know one thing about an employee that takes interest in your company retirement program. That is that he or she is taking a proactive interest in staying with the company long enough to retire. This is not a given for every employee. It used to be in the generation that was in the workplace of the nineteen fifties and sixties that staying with a company for thirty or more years and retiring with full benefits was the norm. That is not the norm any more.

We cannot just blame the job hopping ways of employees for the change of culture away from going for the gold watch and retiring in a company. From the corporate side, so many companies have eliminated retirement packages entirely that there is a strong belief of “do it yourself” retirement in the working population.

A company offers retirement benefits for employees for one purpose. That is to aid with retention. When you have a pool of talented, well trained and energetic employees, that is a corporate resource. So if you can keep those employees all the way through to retirement, that is a real value to any corporate entity.

So if your company does offer these benefits to your employees, its important that you take advantage of them in more ways then just sponsoring them. A retirement package for aging employees sends a message to the employees that the company cares about them and about their families. And this may be true in your company that you have a corporate culture of being involved with your employees at a personal level and maintaining that “we are family” feeling for people who work for you. If that is the case, it makes sense that you would extend that feeling to care for the retirement planning of any employee that you have that shows signs of being a long term value to the company.

You should highlight the company retirement package as early as the interview with your prospective employees. Remember that an interview is about more than you looking for qualified people. It is also about qualify people interviewing you. And that is exactly where the value of a strong retirement package is of greatest value. If a job hunter who is looking for a place to work that they can retire at knows that you have a good plan to help them with their retirement planning, that will draw the brightest and best to your HR department.

Your HR department should not let the retirement issues of employees lie idle for very long at all. The more you help your employees plan for and participate in a retirement program, the happier they will be and the more engaged in their work they will be. Hold regular retirement planning meetings to have employees review their level of participation in the program. This is where you will put in front of the employees your most empathetic HR employees to show genuine interest in the employee’s retirement issues.

Above all be sure to show particular concern and caring for aging employees. And when an employee finally crosses over into retirement, throw a party and go out of your way not only for the company to help the employee transition to retirement but to demonstrate to all employees that the company lives up to its claims to be faithful to employees all the way into retirement. In an economy where so many companies throw people away, your employees will notice that this is not that kind of company. And your faithfulness to retiring employees will result in a rich crop of faithfulness from ongoing employees who stand behind you because you stand behind them from the day they start work in the company all the way through to retirement.

Taking Your Retirement Around the World

One of the most common dreams many people have for their retirement years is to travel. So often when you are in the middle of building a career and raising a family, your travel consists of trips to Orlando for Disney World or doing something focused on the kids. So when you get to that phase of life where your children are grown up and it’s just you and your spouse, now you can focus on trips that are for just you two going places you to go and doing things you want to do.

So if you feel that you will be taking your travel life to a new level when you reach retirement age, there is plenty you can do to get ready. Obviously, you will need to focus your savings and financial preparations so you have an ample budget for travel when the time arrives. The last thing you want is to come up on the time when your dream of traveling together can be a reality only to find that you did not set aside the budget for it.

One way you can do that is to take advantage of the years between when the kids all move out and are done with college and the beginning of you retirement years. This can be as much as a ten to fifteen year time span when both of you can work to payoff bills and build that retirement nest egg. If your basic retirement fund for you to live on is healthy and you are meeting your financial retirement goals, to take one of the spouse’s salary and put it all aside for future travel can result is a very healthy budget to get out and see the world in your golden years together.

It might feel like it’s a little self indulgent for you to set aside so much money for you and your spouse to have travel adventures late in life. Well, you have been a good citizen, a good dad or mom, a good worker and in every respect done the right things all these years. So nobody would deny you the joy of really enjoying the thing you love the most when you do reach your retirement years together.

You can afford a few “training trips” in the years coming up on retirement from time to time to begin to retool your travel skills. If you have been in your career a long time, you may have sufficient vacation that you can take an extra week a year just for adult travel and still have plenty to go see the kids and do all the family stuff that you must do and you enjoy so much.

It will be during these training trips that you will hone your ability to stay on the road longer each time out. Traveling for long periods of time is a developed skill. You will need to learn how to pack, how to manage your international paperwork if international travel is in your plans and how to handle jet lag as well. These are “travelers skills” that you can be developing leading up to that big moment when both partners are able to retire full time and really start getting out there and seeing the world.

Another adjustment and financial resource that can put some additional funding into your travel funds is your house. Many people sell their homes late in life when you don’t need so much space to raise kids and you no longer have the desire or take great joy in taking care of a yard and managing the upkeep on a home. If you know you are going to make this big change of lifestyle away from the home bound mom and dad and toward the world travelers you want to be, you can be preparing the house for sale in the last few years before you retire.

Because you know well in advance that you have a new life of adventure and fun ahead in your retirement years, you can use the last few years before both of you stop working to get ready. Then once your retirement is official and you walk out of the retirement party at work, you can walk right onto the jet way and take off on a brand new life of fun and adventure seeing the world together during your retirement years.

Your Financial Future Is In Your Hands

All of us have one big transition facing us not that far down the road. Of course life is all about transitions. We make a transition from childhood to adolescence. We transition from being a child of a house to adulthood and independence. And we make big transitions through marriage, parenthood and even becoming a grandparent. But of all of these, maybe the one we need to focus on in terms of preparation is the big transition to retirement.

Moving from the world of work and the active life that all that entails to retirement and your golden years is a huge adjustment for people. There are lifestyle changes, changes to your goals and priorities and even in how people view you. But the changes to your finances are perhaps the ones you will notice the most. When you move from getting a steady paycheck to living on your Social Security and retirement, that is a major shift in your expectations and how you plan your life.

The saddest thing we see when it comes to people in late middle age are those who are depending on Social Security to be the sole means of their support in retirement. While Social Security is a fine program, it has created a false illusion of “security” that somehow the government will take care of you in your old age. The “brass tacks” truth is that if you are depending on any outside agency to be your means of support in your retirement years, your assurance that you will be conformable in your retirement years is not assured.

Even if you are currently working at a job that has a retirement program or a 401K that you put some into, you may still be allowing yourself to “depend” on your job to be there for you when you get to retirement age. And the horror stories of the elderly who finally arrive at retirement age to discover that what they thought they could depend on was not reliable are tragic.

This is why starting now to prepare for you financial future will be the best way you can be absolutely sure you will have what you need as you enter that time when you should be able to relax and enjoy the fruit of your labors. This is a major attitude shift and if you can accomplish it and take charge of your financial future, you will approach retirement with much greater confidence.

The outcome of your decision to take charge of your retirement will be that you won’t just let money get put away for you without any oversight on your part. You cannot always trust that the managers of your retirement account at work are handling the money correctly. By staying on top of how those funds are being invested and doing all you can to direct where those funds go, you are making sure that you get maximum return on your investment all along the way. And when its time for you to need those funds, you will be ready to use them because you are acutely aware of their value.

We cannot control Social Security and there is a chance it will be there for you when its time for you to retire. But instead of depending on Social Security, build a financial future that is secure whether it is there or not. Then when you retire and your retirement packages begin to kick and give you that lifestyle of leisure and financial safety that you want, if you do see Social Security add a few dollars to your monthly funds, so much the better.

By taking control over your financial future, you are putting the security of your funds and the planning that you will have what you need when those wonderful years come along. You are depending on the one person you know is in turn with what you will need and has always been abler to plan and provide for yourself and your family and that is you. It’s a good feeling to put the management of your financial future in your own hands in preparation for retirement. But it’s a wonderful feeling you worked hard to enjoy so you deserve it.