Aging well: Tips for retirement/clarifying your priorites

For years, I slept with the national parks.  

Exhausted from work as a hospice nurse, mom, and caregiver, I'd fall into bed, too tired for even my favorite novels.  At the ready by my bedside were my constant friends; stacks of books about national parks, filled with pictures of beautiful places to visit. Someday. Mountains and rivers, canyons and valleys, deserts and oceans, beckoned. Bristle cone pines and big horned sheep waited.  Pages became dogeared, recommended hikes underlined.  Hoped bloomed, and then I slept. 

Respite occurred eventually. An ill child recovered, thankfully, and parents departed for the Eternal Care Unit. Travel dreams became real. Zion was first, better than books, and Velveteen Rabbit real, even with all the people. More parks await. They're a start to my life-and-living retirement portfolio, not the financial one, but the other one, filled with adventures and activities, hopes for today and dreams for tomorrow. We all have that file, either for rea,l or as ideas floating around in our heads. 

Millions of baby boomers are facing retirement. Generation X, too, realizes that retirement isn't as far off as it used to be. Younger generations, worried about financial security, are already meeting with financial counselors to address finance, savings, and 401K plans. Before developing a budget, each one of us needs to figure out how we want to live, both now and in retirement. 

What's important to you? What do you value? How do you prioritize your values, and how does that prioritization impact your life plan and retirement goals? 

It's normal when we're young to put higher values on advancing our careers and maximizing earning. Raising a family takes time and effort, as does caring for aging parents, and all else that fills our days and nights. Little time remains, sometimes for decades, to refocus priorities or even to imagine how you would if you could.  

Dreams of "when I retire, I want to..." or "once we can, we'd like to..." have only been imaginings before. Now, it's our job to incarnate those hopes, give flesh to the dreams.  Sure, we might need to work some, even in retirement, and we may, for financial reasons, need to simplify our lifestyle.  But it's time to make particular plans, to begin to quilt together our own retirement tapestry of goals, priorities, and values.  

A good way to start is to reevaluate where you are in life, how you've lived, and how you want to live. Make some notes: read some books.  You don't have to re-invent the wheel: there are a heck of a lot of retirement related resources, on and off the web.  

I'd suggest an overview first, one like Arthur Brook's book,  From Strength to Strength: Finding Success, Happiness, and Deep Purpose in the Second Half of Life. Brooks interviews people who choose, in or near retirement, to switch careers and use their life experience to serve.  Interestingly these people describe finding in service a deep happiness which evaded them in their prior careers.  That's not to say they, too, aren't making time for respite. They've found balance, though, not solely in the mad dash to enjoyment and vacationing, but in living the good beyond themselves. 

As we age, our life choices sift. That's natural. What was important earlier may now diminish, while what once seemed unimportant, might now be essential. Our futures can loom or beckon, depending on how we're feeling.  Facing aging can be scary or freeing; sometimes both.

Uncover your priorities and figure out what's important to you, now and in the future.  My grandfather used to say, "a person's decision is only as good as the information on which it's based."  In retirement planning, that means gathering info, sleuthing priorities, and crafting a workable life plan and budget.  

Obviously, financial planning is essential.  Money nuts and bolts matter: you can't vacation without money and you can't embark on a life of service without the financial means to do so. Investment advisers and financial planners need you to tease out your priorities and plans before they can help craft a budget. Sometimes they'll ask for a list of what's important to you and request for you to rate your priorities and values.  It's a daunting task.  

Our investment advisor wanted us to make a list of our priorities, values, and retirement goals. We tried and it was harder than we thought.  That's where the Personal Values Pyramid comes in.  It's a tool we developed, based on the food pyramid, to outline our priorities in a simple, comprehensible way.  Here are a few things to consider before filling it out: 

If living a life of service is a priority now or will become a priority for the future, how will that look in retirement? Will you choose to help in your faith community or neighborhood? Is there a small organization which needs your talents and experience to better serve those in need? Maybe a neighbor or friend needs help with health care, advocacy, or lawn mowing. Is that a choice you'd like to make? On the practical level, do you need to budget time, gas mileage to get to your volunteer job? An office space or computer?

If living healthily is important, then choose a lifestyle furthering your health and wellbeing. Budget items such as organic food and the time to cook and to enjoy a meal with family and friends. Perhaps a gym membership or new bike is needed?  Whatever it is, it'll have to be a line item in your retirement budget.

If education is a core value for you, how will it be evidenced in your retirement budget? Is paying for your children’s college tuition or establishing a scholarship fund for grandchildren or disadvantaged children something you want to consider? Do you need to delay retirement in order to meet that goal? 

How about travel? Budgeting an African Safari's or a trip to New Zealand or Italy might put a dent in your budget, while camping in National Parks is more economical. Which you do, and when, depends on you. Set your goals, then plan the finances necessary to accomplish them. Maybe a trip to rebuild houses for a worthy organization or work in a developing country is your goal.  Great.  Plan that. 

A person's life decisions tend to follow their values choices. In order to figure out the funds you'll need in retirement, you need to examine what's important to you now and anticipate what will be important to you in the future. A long narrative might be helpful to you and to your financial counselor,  but too many details obscure what's really important. The guts of what you're saying becomes diluted. Creating a personal values pyramid is one way to illustrate clearly what you value and in what order.  

To create a personal values pyramid: 

Simply google "food pyramid" and open a template. Delete the food and begin building your own values structure in place of the foods. (See the accompanying values pyramid.)  From the ground level up, you'll quickly be able to visualize what's important to you and in what order. The pictorial nature of the graphics is clarifying.  My husband and I developed the personal values pyramid accompanying this text: take a look to give you an example of how you might develop your own. 

Building from the base up, discern the foundational items in your life, above all else.  What is your bedrock value?  This might, as in our example, be a bedrock of faith, evidenced as love of God, spouse, children, family, and community. Or it could be something else, your own bedrock.  

Moving upward from the base, what is the next most foundational values and priorities building block for you?  Might a list of virtues illuminate your values and priorities?  Or something else? Your own virtue/values will impact how you choose to spend you time, and how you will be within yourself during this next chapter in life.  The virtues we value in our example are: integrity, character, discipline, hard work, compassion, mercy, forgiveness, grace.  (Each section is a blend of both of our choices.) 

Service is next up for us, defined by us as "living the good beyond yourself at home and in community."  We value education too, evidenced by our priorities of curiosity, intellect, life-long learning, and self improvement.  In retirement, our goal is to continue to learn, to have our own spouse book club, to listen to podcasts, to learn Spanish, study history, and, in my case, to write and learn more about birds and creatures, trees and plants.

Stewardship is almost at the top for us, which we define as: self care, reflection, renewal, recreation. Caring for oneself is essential: Healthwise and priority-wise.  We plan for respite and renewal, we love to hike and bike, walk, and golf.  Obviously, visiting national parks is a big priority for us.  

The top of the pyramid priorities are descriptors, a kind of haiku of what and whom is important in our life. It's a great way to flesh out the details of values and priorities.  

Clearly, the substructure of any Retirement Values Assessment is hard work and savings. Work and savings provide the ground and soil necessary to build a lasting pyramid. One might, as the pyramid graphic next to this article illustrates, value education and service. But without hard work and financial renumeration, you can't pay for education, housing, or vacations. Even living the good beyond yourself (service) requires some degree of stable financing, financing which needs to be planned and detailed to be effective. 

To further delineate your values, for either yourself or a financial advisor, you may want to add some details. Think of places, concepts, virtues, or activities you love, and add those to the top of the pyramid under What We Love as a kind of personal value haiku. The word-pictorial is descriptive in a way no narrative is. The finished picture paints personal values in clear, bold colors, establishing retirement priorities and helping to craft your retirement life-and-living tapestry. 

Check out our example of a Personal Values Pyramid. Consider making your own...