So what’s the progress with Retirement Lifestyle Design?
Ralph Carlson Blog is my personal journey. It gets under the hood and tells the real life experience behind Retirement Lifestyle Design. It’s not about the perfect plan and implementation. It is a ‘warts and all’ statement about putting this stuff into action in my own life. When you are living the experience, it is hard to mark progress, see the growth and appreciate the lessons. Over time, however, it is impossible to not notice that the scenery is changing and that some things that seemed impossible last year are now just part of business as usual.
Travel Guides (Photo credit: Vanessa (EY))
My wife and I are not in the final countdown preparing for our month in Buenos Aires. The apartment is booked. The airline reservations locked up. We have been studying Spanish and are quite excited that the Pimsleur Course will give us some basic conversational Spanish by the time our plane lands December 5 in Buenos Aires. For me, who normally avoids any communications in foreign languages, this is exhilarating. Now it’s down to the details.
In addition, we have booked a month in Rome next June. The apartment in Trastevere and the airline are locked in, So far we will spend two months of the next year away from home exploring exciting new environments. It is a big change from last year when we started our lifestyle design program.
One year makes a big difference.
One year ago we had just locked up a two week trip to Venice and were nervous as cats about the adventure. We wondered how well we would travel and how much we would enjoy life in a foreign country. Even more significant, we were afraid that the trip to Venice might be our last big adventure. Had we missed our opportunity to travel?
There were so many reasons to stay home. There was the cost of air travel, the apartment rental and incidentals in Venice. But the biggest reason was that we were afraid of all the unknowns. What we discovered was that the unknowns were manageable. We didn’t have one negative experience on the entire trip even though we could not speak a lick of Italian,
The trip showed us how wonderful it is to just live in a beautiful place and enjoy the life experience. We shopped in the supermarkets and local stores. We had our own neighborhood coffee bar (run by a Japanese family by the way). We never entered a hotel and ate in local, not tourist restaurants. It cost more than staying home but not nearly so much as two weeks in a pricey resort- or even a not-so-pricey one. We discovered that we probably over spent on the apartment, basic accommodations would have been sufficient. We used frequent flier miles for the airline but all in all, we found we could handle the cost. And the cost was much less than the pricey riverboat tour we had been considering. And much more exciting.
Don’t wait.
Changing your lifestyle is no dream. Lifestyle Design is the real deal. My lesson is that taking that first step (the two weeks in Venice) opened up the reality that travel was within our means and abilities. We also learned that and the more we got more immersed in the process, we discovered ways to make it cheaper and better.
Today’s report is just to say that the best way to get started with a lifestyle design is just to start. You can’t know all you think you need to know in the beginning. When you start, you find that much of the details will fall into place and you work out whatever doesn’t. Our change priority was travel. That may not be your priority. You may have other lifestyle areas that you want to fix. It doesn’t matter. Take some small step. Then another and gradually the big dream begins to seem possible.
Don’t doubt your ability to change.
Any change appears impossible when you start. You may have other objectives with different problems and things to keep you from starting. All I’m saying today it that after you figure out something you want, don’t wait for all the details to work out. Start doing it. Start small but take action. Then one year from today when you look back you too can be amazed at how far you have come.
