Five Retirement Mistakes You Can't Afford To Make: Mistake #5
Mistake #5: Only Focusing On The Money
As important as it is to make sure that your money issues are squared away as you approach retirement – that you have maximized your Social Security benefits, know what your monthly income and expenses are, have planned for a long-term care event, and that all of these plans are specific to your unique situation – it is equally important to make sure that you are focusing on more than just the money.
As I noted above, you will likely live out your retirement for 20 or 30 years or more. You certainly don’t want to be the person who leaves their retirement party at the job they loved and goes home with no idea how they are going to fill their time. Getting ready for retirement is a time to focus on what is REALLY important to you. How will you fill your time? Who will you spend time with?
You also don’t want to be the person who sits around their home all day obsessing over the balances in their investment accounts. As difficult as it can be for me to work with folks who need to seriously adjust their expectations about what their retirement will look like due to lack of assets, I have been amazed to work with a number of couples over the years who simply could not figure out how to retire. One couple has close to $3 million of net worth, which could easily be turned into a reliable income that, combined with their Social Security benefits, would have supported them nicely for the remainder of their lives.
And yet they both continued to work in jobs that they hated, because the retirement money was “for later.” And they had never taken the time to sit down and figure out what that “later” looked like FOR THEM. Try as I might, I could not get them to stop fearing the unknown and enjoy the fruits of their many decades of labor.
Spend some time thinking about your core values. Write them down. Think about how you want to be remembered, and make a plan to live your retirement years according to your most deeply held values, doing the things you enjoy, with the people you love, and creating a legacy you can be proud of. It doesn’t matter how much money you have – each and every one of us can live a rich life, if we can figure out what that means TO US.
