Just when did retirement planning become synonymous with financial planning?
If you search for ‘retirement planning’ in google, you’ll find information on investing, saving, and estate planning.
Page one search results include:
- Retirement planning – wealth management
- Tips for retirement investors
- Plan your retirement income
- Financial planners in your local area
In fact, they’re not just the first few results that come up, the only results I can find on ‘retirement planning’ focus solely on the money.
So, it’s safe to say that when it comes to advice on the financial side of retirement, we’re pretty well covered.
Don’t get me wrong, I agree that it is incredibly important to have financial security for retirement, but is that really all there is to retirement planning?!
If retirement planning is only about money, that would assume that the only thing that’s important about our work is the regular paycheck. But work is such a huge part of our identity, that money isn’t the only thing that we’ll need to replace when we retire.
Our work gives us so many benefits:
- Achievement & accomplishment
- Purpose
- Time management and structure
- Challenge
- Learning and intellectual stimulation
- Status
- Identity
- Relationships and socialization
So I would argue that retirement planning shouldn’t only focus on replacing income, it should also focus on ways to replace the non-financial benefits of our work.
Have you considered:
What do you love about your work?
What will you miss about your work when you retire?
How will you replace that in your retirement?
What we love about our work will be what we will miss when we leave it, so an essential step in retirement planning is to find new ways to replace the benefits of our work.
For example, you might identify that what you love most about your work is the relationships you have with your colleagues and clients. By identifying that you love (and therefore will miss) your work relationships, you can then brainstorm new ways to replace those friendships in your post-career life.
You could do this by deepening your relationships with your colleagues and clients now so that you can continue those friendships in your retirement, or you could work on developing new social networks and relationships. The choice is yours – focus on existing friendships or develop new relationships. But it’s important to know that if you have identified that relationships are what you love about work, then relationships must be an area of focus for your retirement planning.
So spend some time thinking about what’s important to you about your work. Relationships? Challenge? Status? Structure? Whatever it is, start to think about new ways that you can find that challenge, status or structure in your retirement.
By understanding what you love about your work and will miss in your post-career life, you can then begin to consciously design a fulfilling retirement. This is the essence of retirement LIFE planning.
Sure, we need to ensure that we have adequate retirement savings for the next part of our lives, but we also need to think about what we are retiring to. There’s no arguing that we need a retirement income plan, but perhaps more importantly, we need a retirement LIFE plan.
I’ve created a free downloadable workbook to help you get started to identify the benefits that you get from your work so you can begin to find meaningful ways to replace them in your retirement.
Click here to get your copy: https://tammyvigue.mykajabi.com/replacing-work-benefits-opt-in
I’d love to hear from you. Hit reply and let me know:
What do you love about your work?
Have you thought of ways that you can replace it in your retirement?