One of the nicest aspects of retirement is that your work no longer decides where you have to live.  But does that mean moving to a retirement community in a warm, sunny climate is in your future?  That decision involves a lot more than getting away from your local version of lousy weather.

Where you choose to live needs to be a well-thought balance between what you’ve already built and what you yearn for.  I’m not talking about square footage here.  Where you live now has a lot of pluses (unless you just moved there). 

You already have your network of resources in place—your primary care physician and specialists if you need them, your dentist, your hairdresser, your car mechanic, your plumber.  The list goes on, but you get the point:  When you move, you need to find new back up for what you can’t do yourself on, well, pretty much everything.

And, of course, there’s the daunting task of moving itself.  (Just moving everything to the garage when I got new carpeting last fall was enough to make me promise I’m going to live here forever.)   Moving does help you get rid of stuff you no longer need, but with a bit of discipline, you can do that without putting what’s left in a moving van.

Usually, the big loss of leaving where you are now for “somewhere better” is the network of relationships you leave behind–neighbors, friends who like to do the things you like to do, family, and business associates (who just might be people you want to know three years from now when you get tired of “being retired.”)

Those three are just the tip of the iceberg, too.  You can thrive with a retirement move, but it needs more thoroughly researched than watching the Weather Channel for your dream location a few times a month.  Before you put a For Sale sign on where you are, there are a lot of things to ask yourself:

• What do I not like about where I live now?  Sometimes, just retiring might solve the problem.  Traffic for regular commuters can be horrendous.  Once you make your own schedule you may be able to avoid it most of the time.  Or maybe it’s a case of not having friends where you are now.  Are the time demands of your job what’s keeping you from making them?

• What problems am I expecting this move to solve?  Changing geography doesn’t change who you are.  A new location quickly becomes a disappointment if you think it’s going to get rid of woes that move right along with you.  What are the real issues and what other solutions are there for solving those problems?  Look at all the options rather than just assuming a move will solve everything.

• Who am I going to miss?  Make a list of all the people you love who are going to stay where you are now.  Is the move you’re planning worth having them somewhere you’re not?  It’s easy to lose track of your valued everyday relationships when the romance of living year-round in a resort climate blooms.

• How long do l want to live there?   Maybe it’s not something you will want to do long term.  If you aren’t sure, you don’t have to buy real estate right away. Consider living in the new location on a rental basis for six months or a year rather than pulling up stakes and moving there forever immediately. 

• Is this something that I’ll enjoy everyday? What do you think of the “off season” where you’re planning to move?  A Seattleite who moved to Arizona on retirement admitted when she moved back that having to open the garage door with an oven mitt in the summer was just too much for her.   Some people are fine with taking a fifth wheel to a sunny clime for two months in the worst of winter.  Are you sure you’re not one of them? 

• What kind of lifestyle am I envisioning?  Barbara Morris refers to retirement communities as “senior ghettoes.”  Pay attention to that.  When you segregate yourself from the full breadth of society, your view of the world starts to shrink.  The best way to stay vibrant is to keep your world expanding.  If you do end up in a 55+ community, have ways to get beyond the walls and stay in touch with the full social range.  Relying on the compound fun exclusively will make you old long before you need to be.

• What else is going to change that I haven’t factored into this idea?  There’s a lot more to it than getting away from the snow…gray skies…humidity…whatever.

Moving may be the best answer.  But be sure you’re asking the right questions when you decide.

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Mary Lloyd is a speaker and consultant and author of Supercharged Retirement: Ditch the Rocking Chair, Trash the Remote, and Do What You Love.  She can be reached at mary@mining-silver.com.

As a kid, it was how many weeks of allowance would buy what you yearned for. But as you move through life, the complexities of financial planning increase. That’s not bad, just something to be aware of.

It’s hard to know how much is “enough” for what might come along after you stop working. And it’s hard not to get sucked into valuing yourself by the number of digits in your investment account–if you have one–once work no longer provides an identity.  But if you have determined what’s enough and are fortunate enough to have more than that, why are you sitting on the rest?  

Those of us over 50 hold over 75% of all the financial assets in the US. What are we doing with that?

I’m not stumping for the non-profits with that question. It’s a quality of life issue that each of us answers a different way.  Those answers depend on the money available, sure.  But the effectiveness of these decisions also depends how well we assess our priorities as we make money decisions.

Are you telling yourself you “don’t need” that new furniture  you really want when there’s money available for it? When you do that, you’re living from a scarcity mentality that impoverishes your whole life, not just your financial decisions.

The flip side of this issue deserves a good look, too. Do you need to get your teeth fixed but can’t because you “don’t have the money for it”–while you continue to smoke or head for the casino three nights a week?  It’s all too easy to make decisions based on childish emotions or miserly adult ways when neither serves you well.

These aspects of financial planning are important to consider no matter how much or how little money you have to work with.  “How much” isn’t the operative phrase here.  “How well” works better.  As in “How well will doing this meet my needs?”

I grew up in a large family that didn’t have money to spare. ” We just did things a bit differently than some of the other families in the neighborhood. Mom made the soup we ate. (We naively assumed Campbell’s was a luxury.) We created many of our toys and came up with our own games complete with rules. The Mother Lode in all that is that every single one of us is creative as an adult–in how we decorate our homes, how we solve our problems, how we live our lives.   Our parents blessed with wisdom on how to use our money well rather than savvy on how to amass a lot of it.

Financial planning is not just a matter of “having enough money.” It’s about balancing what you have with what you believe in and want to do–whether it’s a world cruise, starting an heirloom vegetable seed business, funding a school in a Third World village, or treating yourself to a cookie. 

Give yourself the gift of good thought in all this. it’s not about how much money you have. It’s a about what you choose and how it enhances your life.
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Mary Lloyd is a speaker, consultant, and coach and author of Supercharged Retirement: Ditch the Rocking Chair, Trash the Remote, and Do What You Love. For more see her website.    She can be reached at mary@mining-silver.com.

Deciding where to live in retirement is not as simple as we tend to want to make it.  I never thought I’d see my words on a real estate blog, but when Mary Sallman with the Las Brisas retirement community in the Texas Hill County suggested  a guest post about how to do a good job of making that decision, it made perfect sense. 

So…check out the Las Brisas blog –and my guest post of July 14.

There are really good life coaches out there who GET IT about the importance of customizing your retirement years.

Karma Kitaj is one of them. She seems like my emotional twin in the attitude with which she reviews my book Supercharged Retirement. Check out her blog for what has to say about the book and the possibilities for “after we give up work.”

If you want to be miserable in retirement, assume your primary relationship will take care of itself.

Check out Mary Lloyd’s guest post on financial planner Steve Juetten’s Seattle Examiner blog.  How to Mesh Retirement with Your Relationship.

Read Mary Lloyd’s guest post on the Seattle Examiner site.

Steve Juetten graciously invited me to write a piece for his blog for the Seattle Examiner.  He posted it this morning.   He’s a financial planner who”gets it” about the need to mesh financial planning with non-fiancial planning to have “retirement” be satisfying.   I’m hoping Steve will do a guest piece here, but in the meantime, check out my guest post as well as the rest of his blog.

If Not Retirement, WHAT?

The downturn has a silver lining if you use it to customize your plans for “retirement.”  Mary Lloyd will discuss how to do that and sign her book, Supercharged Retirement:  Ditch the Rocking Chair, Trash the Remote, and Do What You Love.

Thursday, Sept. 10 at 7:00 PM
 Barnes & Noble Booksellers
 Vancouver Plaza
 7700 NE Fourth Plain Blvd,
 Vancouver, WA 98662
 (360) 253-9007

Join us if you can!

Steve Juetten has a great post this morning titled “Six retirement traps and how to avoid them.”    He’s a financial advisor who really gets it!  His first two “traps” are lack of  a retirement map and self-limiting attitudes.  He goes on the mention four financial bad ideas, but it’s great that his post starts where those who are thinking about retirement need to start–with what they want to DO and how they want to go about it.

There are a lot of pieces to this retirment puzzle and we each have a different set to work with.  Is a move to a warmer, drier climate really what you need?  Or are you going to be oblivious of the weather of you get involved in that amazingly cool thing you thought had already passed you by?  Are you assuming  you know the answer to those–and similar –questions or have you taken the time to carefully check them out?

Mary Lloyd will be discussing alternatives to the “Golden Years” version of retirement at:

Third Place Books
17171 Bothell Way NE
Lake Forest Park, WA 98155
206-366-3333

Saturday, July 11, at 6:30 PM

She will also be signing books.

Come! Ask questions, share concerns, or just hang out with some interesting people–and learn more about her book: Supercharged Retirement: Ditch the Rocking Chair, Trash the Remote, and Do What You Love

By Mary Lloyd, CEO, Mining Silver

As a culture, we are doing an amazingly stupid thing. So with a nod of appreciation to David Letterman here are the Top 10 Reasons to Stop Thinking “Old” is a Problem. His “top ten” lists go from the last to the first so here, in ascending order, are ten reasons to ditch the idea that advancing age means inevitable decline.

10. IT’S NOT FAIR TO ASSUME PEOPLE WHO ARE “OLD” ARE WORN OUT AND USELESS. Or, to put it more bluntly, it’s not legal—at least if you live a developed country. In the United States, denying someone over 40 fair treatment on “any aspect of employment” because of the year he was born might put you on the losing side of a federal lawsuit that involves both compensatory AND punitive damages.

9. AGE = DECLINE IS A LIE. There are no scientific studies that confirm people automatically lose their ability to think and learn as they age. Studies reporting such findings were done on compromised groups who do not represent the general population of this age range.

8. ASSUMING OLDER WORKERS NEED TO “GET OUT OF THE WAY” SO THAT YOUNGER WORKERS CAN HAVE THOSE JOBS IS SHORT-SIGHTED. Isn’t that a bit like expecting Dad to throw the checkers game when you were 10? Asking competent people to step aside so someone else who can’t do the job as well can step up is like throwing away the candy and eating the wrapper.

7. WE NEED THESE WORKERS. Yes, we are currently dealing with the mother of all recessions, but when it ends, this need will be glaring. There are 78 million baby boomers. Gen X, which follows them, only has 40 million. We are going to need some of those 78 million to stick around longer than “average retirement age” to get the same work done, even with the 70 million Gen Y’ers moving into the workforce.

6. WE NEED OLDER WORKERS’ EXPERIENCE. To compete in a global economy, developed nations need to do more than put bodies at machines. We need people with well-developed problem solving skills. Book knowledge helps, but practical knowledge trumps it. Employees who have “been there and done that” know how to avoid the pitfalls and get the job done right—the first time.

5. WE NEED THEIR WISDOM. Come on, folks. There is no way the wunderkind grad from the most prestigious tech mecca is going to get the people parts and contextual stuff right from the get-go. We need both tech savvy and experienced leadership, leading-edge conceptualizing and seasoned veteran decision-making prowess to get this right. When we choose only “new,” we have nothing to anchor it to.

4. THINKING OLD PEOPLE ARE INEPT IS SOOOO NINETEENTH CENTURY. Yes. Nineteenth century. This nonsense of refusing to marry innovation WITH wisdom began in the 1790’s. Employers from then until the 1950’s used the philosophy as justification for requiring workers to retire at a specific age. Brawn was more of an issue then. Thinking that way was wrongheaded in the Industrial Age. But now we’re in the Information Age, where KNOWLEDGE is critical. It’s corporate suicide. In a knowledge-intensive economy, it makes zero sense to send 40 years’ worth of it out the door so you can bring in someone with none.

3. THEY CAN LEAD THE WAY TO WHAT WE ALL WANT. When people old enough to retire choose not to, they pursue work arrangements the rest of us would love to have as well. Let them craft the new shapes for work that would give us all much needed flexibility so we can live the rest of our lives and work, too.

2. AGEIST THINKING IS EXPENSIVE. We want to pretend that if we don’t see them, those millions of older people we’ve marginalized aren’t there. But they ARE there…tapping the healthcare system far more than they would be with meaningful challenges in their lives, collecting Social Security, and relying on society and the government for things they could be doing for themselves given the chance and the encouragement.

1. WE ARE ALL GOING THERE. The weirdest thing about this form of discrimination is that we are all going to live it—short of dying young. But we think of OTHER people getting old and are blind to what we’re setting up for ourselves. Life expectancy right now is about 80. As knowledge workers, we are very likely to beat that. Do we really want to be invisible and irrelevant for twenty or more years of our lives just because some preacher back in 1790 decided youth and progress was better than age and wisdom?

It’s time to git rid of ageism.  It’s wrong, costs money, and sets us all up for a hard time when we get that far.