Ep 120 | How Do I Start a Retirement Plan? Dream It First

Where do I start with retirement planning? How do I start a retirement plan? The best place to begin is by dreaming. 

Creating a vision for your ideal retirement gives you a clear target to aim for. It shapes the direction of your retirement plan and helps you understand what you’re truly working toward.

What You'll Learn:

✅ Why creating a vision is the first step in retirement planning

✅ How your vision guides and shapes your entire retirement plan

✅ What to do next once your vision is clear

This episode will help you gain clarity on the first few steps in how to start planning for retirement.

Ready to Get Clear on Your Retirement Path?

Book your free Confidence Kickstart Call and in just 30 minutes, you’ll know what’s standing between you and retirement, and how to overcome it.

👉 Click here to book your free call now

Or, grab one of my free resources to help you take the first step:

5 Must-Do Steps for Retirement Planning — A simple guide to help you prepare with purpose

Retirement Ready Checklist — Make sure you’re not missing a single step on the road to retirement

Transcript

 Today's episode is going to help you understand where do you start answering that question? How do I start a retirement plan? Now, as I tell you where you need to start, you're going to feel some resistance, whether that is intentional or maybe just your mind, you're not sure how to do that. But the where we start with retirement planning is understanding where we're going, creating a vision, creating a dream.

Now, I use vision, but I love to use the word dream because that's what I want you to do. I want you to dream about what retirement is going to be, what it will look like. And this is hard as adults to just freely start creating those ideas. Dreaming is hard for us to do because we've seen so much. We've heard so much, we've been told so much that these beliefs start shutting down our brains.

I really want you to fight that as much as you can, and I want you to dream about what retirement is going to be. Now, where can we turn to, to emulate this dreaming so that it's not strained, so that it's free thinking. I think we need to turn to children. We can't go too young for this exercise I want you to try and do, and we can't go too old because I don't want them to have heard and been told the things that you're trying to resist from.

But I want you to, if you have access to a, child, a grandchild, even maybe a neighbor, a best friend's child, wherever, or wanting to seek out a conversation with a child who is between the ages of six to 10, and I want you to have a conversation with that child,  and I'm sure this will be fun.

And as you are having this conversation, and I'm gonna tell you what to ask them in just a moment, I want you to listen to their unfiltered responses because we know children can dream. You know, age four, five, even six, they're coming to you and they're like, I'm gonna be this and I'm gonna do this. And you just think, yeah, okay.

You know, 'cause that's the resistance in the barriers we have. We wanna get back to that possibility for creating our vision and our train. Ask this child, what would you do if you didn't ever have to go back to school? Because their school, and even if they're homeschooled, there's still a part of their day that's being taken out.

What would you do if you didn't have to go to school? Their school is your work. It's all we've really traded, we were educated, then we went to work. Now we're hoping to retire and we don't know what to do. Spend some time with this child. Asking them what are you going to do and why would you choose to do that?

And oh, what made you think of that? really having a conversation. It doesn't have to be long. 'cause honestly, this child is not gonna spend, 15, 20 minutes with you is gonna be more like five, maybe 10 if you're lucky. But I want you to again, listen to their unfiltered responses, the words they're using and the energy.

What is their excitement like? Why are they so excited to do that? And how can you create the same for yourself? That is what we need to tap into to start creating our retirement vision slash dream. I know this is something that a lot of us have been asked to do for different things. you're working and you're supervising and you're like, what is the goal?

What is, what do we wanna do in five years or 10 years? And it does take a lot of effort to project and to think. And a lot of us are like, I'm just not gonna do that. I'll figure it out. But I want you to consistently come back to what is it that I've truly desire to have outta retirement. Not when I retire, but what you truly desire now, if you don't have access to a young child, I want you to go to listen to episode 98 where I talk about the different experiences to plan for.

This will also help, to get your juices flowing, to start thinking about what it is you truly want from retirement. This is something we're also going to be covering in the upcoming bootcamp. If you want to get into the details and more than this episode or episode 98 provides, be sure to join that event as well.

But why is getting clear about my vision and a dream truly the first step? There are two main reasons, a vision. While it may seem abstract to you, you can actually turn it into an action plan, and I'll tell you how in just a minute. But also creating a vision dream that you're excited about creates the motivation and the desire that you need to get to retirement as quickly as possible.

If we're not excited about somebody something, we are not going to do the work.  Creating this vision, creating the understanding of what it is that we truly want from retirement is what will help us put in the work now to reach that even sooner to create what we truly, truly desire. Rather than just happenstance, retire because the age said so, because that's what other people were doing.

And then we get on that flip side, and there is no purpose or fulfill fulfillment. And that is another reason for creating this vision in this dream, is we need to create this next phase to be something very enjoyable. We have worked hard. You have worked hard for how many years, put in all of that work, and now you deserve to have something as great, if not even better.

I want to share a couple of ideas of a starting point for creating retirement vision, I figured this will help get your juices flowing in a different way than episode 98 gives us. Imagine somebody who. They, they love to work. They love to be busy. Work is not the problem, but the work they have, 

whether it's stressful because they're a supervisor, whether they just don't love where they're at, the environment, the, whole, whole politics of it has changed. Or they want to lean into a, a hobby that they have that they enjoy and they just don't have time to do it as often, and they know they could profit from it.

So that feeling, those people are probably going to end up working in retirement, and that is okay if that is what you choose. I don't want people to end up here and go like, oh, I don't have enough money. I have to go to work. We gotta lose. Those have tos. Now we want to create those dream twos. Think about a side hustle, a part-time job somewhere, or even a full-time, but in a different place, and something that you've always dreamed about working at.

I would love to do that. I would love to do that. what were those things you were saying, but because you were in the job you were, that was providing for your family, as you're raising them, now you're ready to do something different. We're not ready to go to that recliner. And watch, shows and eat bon bons all day.

No. We are ready to create purpose and have a fulfilled life. It doesn't end when we quit work. Think about this individual. I'm gonna travel in retirement. Great, great. This person could travel to, many different locations, but I want more specific like. I'm going to travel once a year for two or three weeks at a time with my spouse, or if you're single with a friend, whatever that may be.

I'm going to travel with my family. I'm gonna provide an amazing trip for my family, my grandkids, once a year, or I'm going to sell my house and travel United States and find somewhere to live. There's three different things in just traveling. There are so many options for you, so many ways to create what retirement will be.

Why is this important and now how does it help you? We hopefully get excited and we create that motivation and the desire, but we not have to know how to take that vision and create an action plan. The action plan comes with first defining the expenses or defining the income, or defining all of those pieces.

The individual who is going to run a side hustle or work part-time, our income's gonna drop a bit, but we still have income coming in. What does that look like? The person who is traveling, remember I said how often and where and how long? How much is that gonna cost? We've got to get those expenses in there.

We are going to sell our home and travel in an rv. Well, selling our home gives us some money, but then we've got to plan how is that going to aid us into relocating and or living for a year in an rv or six months or whatever that is. How you start creating that action plan, defining those expenses. Or not losing the income, but looking how you're supplementing your re retirement income.

Hopefully this has helped you understand why creating a vision is so important, and this is how you start retirement planning. For the individual who is 40 50, this is. Very important to do because as you create the expenses and as you start dialing into that number, it's so much easier to figure out how much you need to save.

We can guess what our expenses are gonna be, or we can start doing the work and lining up what those expenses truly will probably be. It just makes working that path, doing that quote, hard work so much easier because we have a vision. We're creating the action steps. Things are starting to fall in place.

Our motivation and desire for what we want stays up. It keeps going. If you're wanting to dive into retirement planning even further. I want to invite you to join my Retirement Ready bootcamp. We start June 3rd where I will walk you through how to increase your retirement readiness, how to create a retirement lifestyle you love, and how to know if you have enough.

And what to do if you don't. We're diving into this as being one of the pieces, but then what are the next steps and how does that look like, and how do I create that FI number, that financial independence number, that, how much do I need to have saved for retirement? We're diving into all of that over this.

I'm calling it a four day experiences, but those three topics will be on three days bonus, fourth day. Free 30 minute coaching to apply what you've learned and get some personalized support. How do you truly apply this to your situation? I hope you'll join me. I'm excited to share all my knowledge and help you get a more clear about creating a vision to lose that resistance.

Just remember. It's important to create a vision of what we want, not just by default, but we need to do so for fulfillment and purpose, but also to help us start defining expenses, start understanding what a true cost of retirement is going to be. I hope you'll join me next week when we dive into. The more specifics of the bootcamp and what we've talked about, how they all those pieces fit together.

I'm excited to help you understand all of the steps in retirement planning. We'll see you next week.