“Success is nothing more than a few simple disciplines, practiced every day; while failure is simply a few errors in judgment, repeated every day. It is the accumulative weight of our disciplines and our judgments that leads us to either fortune or failure.” Jim Rohn
The problem with retirement planning is; you think ﾠyou have so much time before you retire that it’s a low priority and you keep putting off your need to plan for what you feel are more pressing issues. So you do nothing about it!
That’s the subtlety of time and as you delay you are losing two of your most important resources – Time and Money. Putting you in a very dangerous position because your ability to accumulate wealth for retirement is based primarily on time and investment return. Without both of these working together, it will be difficult to achieve your goals.
If you start too late, you’ll be counting on a higher rate of return to make up the difference for the time lost, leaving you exposed to much greater market risk. The less time, the more difficult it is to take advantage of compounding, greatly reducing the wealth you would have been able to accumulate.
That is why there is not a better time than now to start planning for your retirement. You see whether you believe it or not, you are headed to a time in your life when you will not have the luxury of a job or the comforts of a regular paycheck.
This means that you would have to rely on other sources for your income. Income that you will need to pay for mounting medical bills, repairs to your home, telephone, electricity, food and other daily expenses of living. If this income does not exist, then you may find yourself losing the comfort and independence of being in your own environment.
As you look around you, the evidence is there that you must overcome the urge to procrastinate and get started on your retirement goals, because every day you wait is only going to make it more difficult to have the life you really want.
To get you started, here are five steps that are guaranteed to help you achieve your retirement dreams:
Step One: Commit to the Process
Retirement planning is a process, not an event. Therefore, you must become committed to the process. ﾠCommitment for most of us is a burdensome word but you must realize that your are already committed to something and right now it just isn’t wealth creation. So decide to adjust your focus and commit to something that will certainly allow you to enjoy the life you want.
To achieve your goals will require a commitment of time on a regular basis. You will have to decide if this is a task you want to tackle on your own or one that requires you to get the help of a professional. Remember that you are not alone; there are various sources of help available to you some at a cost and others for free.
If you choose to go it on your own, you must remember the key limitation is time, and that 100 percent of the workload will rest on your shoulders. If you decide to work with a professional, you will have not only expertise but also help in achieving your goals. Someone, who then becomes accountable to you and you to them creating a team, which is always better than one.
Step Two: Collect Information
The second step involves, pulling together all the information that you will need as you begin to conceive and develop your plan. You cannot plan or change a situation until you are aware of that situation. So this step allows you to collect all the information necessary to get a snap shot of where you currently stand financially.
Included here would be information on the following:
ﾷ Income and assets
ﾷ Expenses and liabilities
ﾷ Insurance
ﾷ Legal documents
Step Three: Develop a Strategic Plan (what you want)
Once you have collected all of the necessary information, you can start to lay out a strategic plan. Here you are deciding what you want out of your retirement by setting the goals that you would like to achieve. ﾠIt’s important at this stage to keep the tactical aspects of the plan at bay until you have completed the strategic aspect. In other words, this is not the stage to start looking at any investment vehicle, regardless if ﾠyou have listed them as assets or feel compelled to buy them.
This is the stage of the process at which you decide and articulate your retirement goals and determine the cost of your individual goals.
Step Four: Implement the Tactical Plan (how to get what you want)
In this fourth step, you are ready to implement the plan. This is the tactical element where you match assets to goals and look at how you are going to use the monies that you now have to help you achieve the goals in your plan. One of the benefits is: that you will know what you want and be able to focus your finances to achieve it, therefore eliminating unnecessary expenditures.
This is also the step at which you’ll take action on implementing an estate plan and you’ll develop a plan for managing the various elements of risk that can impact your goals. Issues such as Life and Property insurance for your assets and ﾠ”enduring power of attorney” will be finalized.
Step Five: Monitor and Update the Plan
The final step is: to monitor and update your plan. This involves periodically reviewing your goals and the assets assigned to meeting those goals. It also involves looking at how your life may have changed and how changes affect both your goals and other elements of the plan such as estate, and insurance planning. As you change jobs or are promoted within an organization, your life can change and your goals may be affected by those changes. You may have gotten married or had another child or you may have lost your job.
So the monitoring stage allows you to update your plans to reflect your current situation and by continuing to review and modify your plan, you’ll increase your changes of achieving success.
It takes time to develop and grow your retirement dreams but if you start to day to follow these five steps you will be giving yourself the best shot of becoming one of the few who will be able to enjoy their golden years without financial concerns.
“It takes time to develop, grow and build the life you want. So give your retirement dreams the time they deserve and watch them become reality.” Glenn
By Glenn Ferguson – a speaker and coach who specializes in financial and retirement coaching Email to: glen@coralwave.com Tel: 242-327-2453 ﾠﾠFax: 242-327-2456
