When to Start Planning Your Lifestyle Retirement Plan
It’s when your mind starts shifting perspective, that’s the time to begin to plan for your non-financial lifestyle retirement.
For sure you should start before you retire. We can still do the work after, but it’s much better if you can do it before and then just adjust your plan as you move through retirement.
Most people start in their late fifties, early sixties, but again, it’s not really an age, it’s a state of mind that you’ll notice that you go to work and you look around and you go, you know, I don’t really want to be doing this anymore. There’s gotta be more to life than this.
And you think, and then you find yourself thinking back, gosh, I’m 60. I might have another 30 years or 20 good ones. What do I want to do with this precious time?
And it’s when your mind starts shifting perspective, that’s the time to begin to plan for your non-financial lifestyle retirement.
And hopefully you’ve been planning for your retirement all along since your employment that you’ve been putting money away. So that’s really important.
But the part about designing a lifestyle plan that might come a little bit later, like in your late fifties, early sixties.
The 3rd Act Retirement Coaching
Nothing is written in cement. This is a time of flexibility and openness.
The 3rd Act coaching helps people because I have a clear step by step plan that people can walk through.
I offer group coaching. I offer different combinations of sessions that people can work with me individually. I have workbooks.
The thing that’s unique about The 3rd Act is that I have clear, easy steps to follow.
A lot of people who come in to see me initially feel really overwhelmed.
“I don’t know who I’m going to be. I can’t imagine what I’m going to do with my time. I’m overwhelmed.”
If you focus down and go step by step through the process, you will come out the other end with the plan and a plan that you feel good about and a vision you feel excited about that you can share with your financial planner and with your family and friends that you feel really happy and engaged in your life rather than pulling back.
I often think about The Third Act in, in a new way, like the old retirement idea. If you think about an airplane coming down for a landing and tightening their seat belt and putting up their tray table.
For The 3rd Act, it’s not landing. It’s like taking off in a new life.
I help people with an easy step by step process of making a plan.
And the thing that’s very interesting about this time of this pandemic time is that people are calling me and asking about rejiggering their plan, rethinking their plan.
Maybe they had a really great 3rd Act plan, but now they’re not able to travel or they’re not able to go out and do the volunteer work, or they’re not able to go out and do the job that they, maybe the business that they designed for themselves or created for themselves.
So people come back and want to re refocus their 3rd Act. And I encourage that, you know, nothing is written in cement. This is it. This is a time of flexibility and openness.
You have a goal, you have intent, you have intentions, you have a vision, but you can change those.
Opportunities in Challenging Times
A client that I’d had about 10 years ago came back to me recently. She’d had her plan all set up and she is a writer and she had written a book and she was all ready to go out into all these promotional PR talks.
Because of the pandemic, she couldn’t do it. And she was just like, I don’t know what I’m going to do. I have this book, but I can’t get it out.
So we talked and thought about it and she’d had this one opportunity to do a Zoom presentation and she was really anxious about it. She didn’t think she would like it and she did it and it was really successful and she liked it.
And then she realized that she could do more Zooms and she could do more presentations to more people than she could have ever done before the pandemic.
What I help people do is to look for the opportunities. It’s that whole idea of making lemonade out of lemons.
People still are looking for information they’re still wanting to connect. It’s a new way of connecting, but we can connect as human beings still.
That’s an example of one way of dealing with this challenging time that we find ourselves in.
First Steps to Planning with The 3rd Act
Connect with Patricia Cavanaugh, founder of The 3rd Act on her website: www.The3rdAct.com.
When you go to the website, you’ll see that you can either get a free resource list, or you can sign up for a free half hour discovery call, or take the quiz.
The quiz is great because it helps you to assess where you are in your retirement. Or is it too early? Are you just getting ready and it’s time for you to really reach out? Or are you happily along your way? It just gives you a good assessment of where you are.
