Making your retirement wishes happen – A Strategy for action

Step 1: Visualize your perfect retirement day

Don’t hold back. Dredge up the most fantastic vision of your perfect retirement day and write down all the details. Imagine yourself living that day. Who are the people you are spending time with, Where are you? What do you do? It can be extravagant or not. What is important is that you can feel the emotion and how much you want that perfect day. It is fishing with your son? Is it playing golf with buddies? Is it hiking in the mountains, reading in your ocean-front cottage? This is your retirement lifestyle.   Make it as detailed as you can. Feel it then ask yourself.

Step 2: What would it take to make that perfect day possible?

Identify what you need to change to make that perfect day a reality. Do you need more money? Do you need to move to a different house, or a different state? Do you need to fix your social life and connect with friends and family? Have you neglected your health? Maybe there is more than one thing that needs to change. Don’t get overwhelmed, just compile a list. Decide which is more important or needs to happen first and order your list. Then start with number one and design a program to make the change happen. Take small steps that move in the right direction and persist, even when it might seem that nothing is happening. Keep the dream of your perfect day alive. Don’t give up because any change that moves you closer to your perfect day is a victory.

Step 3: Discover what can you do to make it happen?

Look around to find people who live the kind of life that you want in your perfect day and study them. If you can, talk to them and ask questions about how they made their life happen. Learn how to change into the kind of person that has the lifestyle you want. You aren’t changing your lifestyle so much as changing yourself and when you change yourself, the retirement lifestyle you want will follow

Step 4: Take Action

Don’t let yourself be ambivalent about your dream. Relive the perfect day. Feel the lifestyle. Know how much you want to be living it because until the dream is part of you, you won’t take the steps required to make it happen.