By now you should have a financial planner in place. Your vision should begin to become clearer and assuming its your choice to retire, you should have a timeframe and date in mind. Time will go by very quickly during this crucial planning part.

The transition into retirement can be quite hard. We learned from our very own experience and realized that we didn’t plan ahead enough and felt as though we had little purpose or direction. We had a solid financial plan, however we didn’t have a life plan. We now know that the more prepared you are for your life during retirement, the more personal fulfillment and happiness you will have.

How do you begin planning when you are 1-5 years away from retirement?

Start journaling.

Don’t be afraid of this important step. Buy a journal; lined, unlined, whatever you like. Start recording your thoughts, feelings, struggles and success. We want you to write in this journal, no typing for this step, this is not a digital journal. When you write, you slow down, and truly gather your thoughts. Begin listening to your inner voice and writing it down important thoughts incorporating where you are now and where you want to be. Ideally you should break you journal up into buckets/sections; we recommend using our 5 Pillars as buckets as a good place to start:

• Physical wellness
• Mental wellness
• Relationships that you want to deepen or let go of
• Spouse/partner alignment or misalignment wherever it might be.-
• Wisdom sharing- what will you do for personal fulfillment and to serve others?

We want to pay particular attention and focus into wisdom sharing, which truly is a core component of your retirement. To start, you need to get a better assessment of yourself, what you’ve enjoyed and what you’d like to stay away from.

Action step:

Get a blank piece of paper and create 5 columns. Begin to think about all the jobs that you have ever had throughout a specific timeframe. It could be 20 or 30 years, you decide what’s appropriate for your lookback. This task will help you to identify your skills, likes and dislikes.

Break the paper into five columns:

• First column list all of the jobs you have ever
• Second column, list the date(s) of the jobs
• Third column – what did you love about that job? What emotion comes to mind
• Fourth column – what didn’t you like about that role? You won’t want to get caught up in a role like this ever again, especially during retirement.
• Fifth column – what has this job or role taught you? Pick your top 5 jobs for roles that you have had over the last 30 plus years. Highlight them.

Next, on a separate paper, list your strength and values as they speak to you. Identify your top 5 and then compare them to the jobs that you listed. Draw some comparisons and start writing about your observations. Also, begin to pay closer attention to the things you enjoy about your current job. For instance, if you are a finance person and enjoy working in spreadsheets, take note of that. This exercise reminds us of a book we read, Wisdom at Work by Chip Connelly, where he talks about the making of a modern elder. It’s an awesome read, make some time to check it out.

Start volunteering.

After you’ve completed the assessment of your skills, likes and dislikes, you will have a stronger understanding of where you might like to begin to volunteer. Making a connection with an organization in your community now, may prove to be helpful in transitioning into retirement. You will have a built-in network of people to continue to connect with.

Keep journaling…other topics to write about would be travel, home, hobbies and more. Start to do some research and organize your thoughts around whether or not you want to travel around the world, plan state side sightseeing or just visit with relatives around the country. Where will you want to live? Will you stay in your current home, do you want to consider purchasing a vacation home? Now is the time to start getting curious and doing research. Another topic for journaling is to write down your current hobbies and other possible hobbies that you would consider exploring if you had more time. Maybe now is the time to start the hobby that later you can invest more in to. For example, you could start to learn to play golf, so that once you are retired, you are well trained and familiar with the sport. Same goes for painting, if you take a few classes now, you will be well on your way to engaging more frequently in your hobby upon retirement.

The next five years are going to go fast. We don’t want you to coast and wait for the last 12 months prior to retirement. Planning is crucial and writing your thoughts down will help to keep you organized and on track. The final year before retirement takes a tremendous amount of organization. The more you plan ahead, the easier it will be. We will discuss that in our next blog post.

You can watch our YouTube video on this topic by clicking here.