Lifestyle Design has two dimensions

Retirement Planning is personal

Time to focus

RalphCarlsonBlog has always been personal. It is about my personal journey to reach the lifestyle design I want. Most recently it has focused on my efforts to design and live the retirement lifestyle that makes me happy and satisfied with my life. What complicates this effort, is that there is more involved than just choosing. There is also the earning. I might like my lifestyle to include an African safari but my current income won’t permit this option. So one part of my lifestyle design is developing additional income streams to make my choices happen.  This is the aspect of retirement planning that nobody talks about.

Lifestyle Design is the real retirement planning.

I blog about my lifestyle choices and retirement lifestyle here at RalphCarlsonBlog while I work on business efforts elsewhere. This separation of two different activities seemed sensible when I started because the two seemed separate and unrelated. I plan my lifestyle in one segment and work on developing the income from multiple income streams to support it in another. Now it seems wrong. I can’t keep the two segments separate any longer. Retirement planning, at least my version, requires both.

Living well is central to my retirement lifestyle and making choices will control the result. At this stage of my life, I can’t put my life on hold while I wait for more income. I also can’t choose a life of leisure if I want to develop more income. There has to be just one plan for my life. I have to make time in my lifestyle for work and play. My retirement lifestyle includes both. Truly I believe that I would not be happy lounging on the beach 24/7 but right now it doesn’t matter. I can’t afford that lifestyle.

What I want is more like the Tim Ferriss Four Hour Workweek model; work hard for a few months and develop an income that becomes residual over time.  Maybe there are multiple income streams that result.  There are variations around this theme but the real point is that a satisfying retirement  lifestyle provides variety. I want control of my life, not a job.  That is the way my retirement planning is directed.

Another point is that I am retired. There is good and bad with that. I have some steady income. It just doesn’t support all of the lifestyle choices that I want. The bad is that I am old and getting older. I can mitigate and manage that decline but I can never stop it. Another good is that I have complete control of my time. I can do what I choose and schedule as I desire. Making good decisions about using that time is my challenge, But there is no one to hold me accountable.

How I started. 

My original intent was to provide information and encouragement to people who are already retired or getting ready to retire, Using my life as an example, I wanted to help them consider the options available. Along the way I learned that we don’t know what we don’t know. People need knowledge about options. There are so many possibilities and it is so easy to cling to the familiar. Retirement should be a glorious finish to life and not just a clock running down.

My life and my ideas are limited. I try to be outrageous and open in my thinking but all of us have a hard time embracing the new and unfamiliar. My wife and I are committed to the idea of traveling for long periods of time. We started easy with just two weeks last Spring but we are now scheduling one month in Buenos Aires at Christmas and a month in Rome next June. These won’t be extravagant trips but we will have the luxury of time to explore a place fully and take a day off when we need it.

Currently I have this personal blog and the one where I explore business activities. Right now they are completely separate. My goal over the next months is to integrate them. I don’t yet know what this will mean. I expect that I will make this up as I go along and revise from time to time. Initially I will try to more transparent about my web activities, linking content and seeking comments from readers on both sites.

Moving along.

So to begin the process, I would like to introduce readers of RalphCarlsonBlog to JobOptionalNow, my business blog where my intent is to provide information to people just getting started with business on the web. I share things I have learned about personal growth and suggest books and sources of information that are more authoritative. I am preparing videos and other content to help people on their journey and in time I expect to offer products and services but not before I prove that I can be a source of valuable free content.

So today I ask my readers to visit JobOptionalNow and look at the content in the Blog section. I would appreciate comments about this post and the idea of being more transparent about everything I am doing. If you have interest in the information at JobOptionalNow, please comment and join my mailing list.

If you are more interested in Lifestyle Design, then join the mailing list here. And if you see value in both sites, then help me find the right way to put this whole effort together. Tell me about your problems and concerns, the issues that hold you back from living the way you want to live, your own personal lifestyle design.