First, a joke:
I’ve been reading a horror novel in Braille.
Something bad is gonna happen — I can feel it.
And now, a plea:
Please consider “retirement” in terms of weeks or months that you will need to be purchase.
Imagine how you want to be using your time.
Where are you?
Who are you with?
What are you doing?
How long from now is this happening?
As absurd as it may seem to think as though you have your hands on some kind of magic crystal ball, it truly is helpful to envision concrete aspects of an otherwise super abstract and fuzzy idea.
Leverage a recent vacation experience (if you are fortunate enough to have had one recently). With the benefit of hindsight, it’s a rather simple task to piece together a baseline for what a typical week’s discretionary expenses might look like.
You’ll likely be better off by removing certain one-off expenses that don’t fit the story you envisioned earlier.
Now weave in some numbers that would be prudent to keep in mind for non-discretionary expenses, like insurance.
(This is the part where you ask your crystal ball, “Please consider inflating these figures for the sake of inflation — thanks!”)
Mix all of this up, toss it in the oven, and voila:
You have a wrong, but somewhat useful, but definitely wrong, representation of what the bill for a week or a month of retirement looks like.
This rough estimation can then be scaled up with certain assumptions in mind (time periods and rates of inflation, for example) to create a financial Frankenstein that serves as the pool of money that will need to exist in one form or fashion in order to fund the collection of weeks and months you expect to “purchase” down the road.
Then it becomes a matter of deciding how to close any potential gaps.
Will this exercise produce accurate results? No.
Can it serve you anyway by giving you some context for decisions that will impact the future in a significant way? ____.
Anyway, this week’s edition is about to end — I can feel it.
You can reach me at hello@leewayplanning.com — thanks for your time and have a swell rest of the day.
Sincerely,
Cody L. Ward
P.S. For what it’s worth, a pretty wise guy said, “it’s better to be roughly right than it is to be precisely wrong.”