Retirement Planning

Retirement, it is an thought provoking concept.  I think a fair few of us contemplate working along until the government tells us we can access our superannuation, and then we hang up the suit and paddle off into the sunset.  But as our generation ages, the rules of life are starting to shift.  Perhaps it is the impact of living longer lives, or more ambitiously thinking it is that society has started to warm to the concept of financial independence, in whatever angle that means for each individual.  Generally, it is a life of less stuff, of more experiences, and one where having everything and working 70 hours per week to get it is not considered to be the best use of our finite existence.

My 65 year plan always included retiring by the water.  In the earlier stages, thinking surrounded a canal property down the Gold Coast.  As I travelled more and found alternatives to bull sharks swimming around with a increasingly seedy night life, I have fell in love with Caloundra and the Sunshine Coast as a location.  The past few years I have been fixed on a lovely apartment where I can hear and see the ocean.  Something like this was incorporated into the plan;

Of course with all good life plans, one needs to have some flexibility.  Turns out the partner's life plan always includes a family dog, which may not suit my images above!  So after some research my mental images have to take a slight revision, but we have easily come to a joint picture of what the retirement phase will look like, and the location.  So I have printed a couple of memory joggers and placed them on the fridges in each house as a reminder of what will come.

Like many others, I want to transition to those retirement years.  So we plan to purchase in the locality ahead of time.  The compromise is that I won't be able to have this option at first.  We have children that need to go through school, and that will take awhile, or more specifically another ten years.  But in ten years we are both in our 50's, so a house up the coast in the next five or six  will allow for us to start spending our weekends away.  The kids are older and are having lives of their own, and we will survive left at home for a couple of nights, or they can even join us up the coast, the life style is great with the beach just around the corner.

With the bigger piece of the puzzle sorted, we now just have to navigate the path through to the five or six year point!