Don't Plan For Retirement, Plan for Life Satisfaction

Want to know a secret that the investment management industry would never tell you? You don’t need to waste every precious moment worrying what your finances will look like in 20 years.

Don’t get me wrong, planning for the future is important, you probably don’t want to or might not be able to work your whole life. Even if your employer offers all the perks from in-house massages to free lunches, you’re still working. Some days working isn’t so bad, but everyone has days when the desire to do what you want exceeds your desire to commute. And perks or not, you just don’t want to go! 

Truth be told, retirement from most jobs is inevitable and should be exciting. Everything from the daily grind will someday fade away into quaint memories as you laugh your way into the magical realm of retired people – assuming you planned for life satisfaction. Retirement could mean tightening up the budget and down-sizing by necessity instead of by choice, or it could mean a seamless transition from on-the-job to doing whatever you damn well please whenever you feel like it!

But isn’t it irresponsible to not worry about retirement when you are in your 30s and 40s? I don’t think so. The world is moving at light speed and there is NO way for you to know exactly what you will be doing or how you will be feeling at age 62. For all you know you will be a “retire-preneur” with another 30 work years ahead of you.

OK… so, don’t save for the future? No, save… but save for life satisfaction TODAY. When you save for life satisfaction, you’ve taken care of today and tomorrow. You know the lifestyle you’re comfortable with living, and you’re ensuring that you have the ability to maintain it (or change it) beyond your working years.  

As if often the case, Morgan Housel recently gave the best explanation for saving today.

“Savings gives you options and flexibility, the ability to wait and the opportunity to pounce. It gives you time to think. Every bit of savings is like taking a point in the future that would have been owned by someone else and giving it back to yourself.”

-Morgan Housel  “Save like a pessimist, invest like an optimist”

Here at Zoe, we do what we do because we know that a lifetime of satisfaction starts today.  We also know that it is important to have guidance on how to balance the life you want with the resources you have. For example, setting up automatic withdrawals from your paycheck to be deposited into your savings account can really add up when retirement is on the horizon. With automatic deductions, you technically, never see that money. Instead, it grows over time thanks to the magic of compounded interest.

To help you strike the right balance of saving and satisfaction, we hand-match you with an independent planner who wants to learn everything you enjoy about today and who’s ready to create a plan that allows you to have a sustainable lifestyle in the coming months (as well as the coming years).  They empower you by advising you, not controlling you, and set up your life satisfaction plan the way you decide is best. Retirement can be as much of a reflection of today as you want it to be; satisfaction today grows by providing the flexibility to change your definition of your tomorrow.