About to plan retirement? It’s not just about floating down beaches in gauzy clothes or poring over pension calculations anymore.

Is it list of projects you plan to take on as soon as you stop going to work full time? Is it a list that will soon be finished, leaving you with another twenty or thirty years to fill?

Take a look at the list I thought was a retirement list. Turns out it was something completely different

Lots of people still tend to think that planning retirement means planning money questions.

And apparently most of the people in the financial planning industry think that way. If you Google the phrase, planning retirement, most if not all of the entries on the first page are about financial planning. Only a few sites hint that there are lifestyle questions to planning retirement, not just money questions.

What a Martian would think if he (she?)came to earth and read our retirement ads
If a Martian came to earth and studied how we plan retirement by reading print ads or watching TV ads, he/she would have a pretty strange picture.

Our Martian would be convinced that 70 million earthling retirees plan to be on the golf course. And when we’re not on the golf course we’ll be floating down beaches in gauzy clothes, or beaming at each other over glasses of wine on a terrace overlooking the sea.

But if you’re coming up to official retirement age these days, chances are you are healthy, active and looking forward to many more years of activities that take in more than golf and beaches.

Designing your own retirement involves designing a new lifestyle, not just poring over the bankbook, the savings and the pension calculations.

To plan retirement is to plan a new lifestyle, or at the very least, to modify your current lifestyle. And lifestyle involves all aspects of our daily life.

Moving from dreaming to designing and planning retirement
The first step is to list the many questions we will be tackling to plan retirement our own way.

• Where will I live?
• Will I move?
• Why would I move?
• What kind of place do I want to live in – apartment, house, condo, other
• Do I want to split my time between two or more places?
• Will I work part-time?
• Will I start that little hardware store I always dreamed of having?
• Will I offer a service?
• How will I stay fit?
• What hobbies will I pursue?
• What do I want a typical day to look like when I am not on vacation?
• Now that we have a better idea of how we will design our retirement, how much money will it cost to live that way?
• Do we have enough? If not, how long will it take to get enough? And how will we do it?

Now we need to start listing those questions, and deciding which ones to tackle first. We may all start in different places, but in the end we should all cover most of the questions.

Maybe your friend needs to start by getting on the phone and talk to her children about their life plans. Maybe you would like to do some on-the-ground-research. You could travel to the place where you are thinking of spending some retirement time. Maybe I should spend my next vacation starting or growing that retirement hobby, or investigating the cost of starting up that small business.

Designing our own retirement means just that – taking it in hand and shaping it the way we want.

What? Retirement is work?
Well, planning it is.

So if we are planning to design our own retirement, it’s time to get to work!

I'm about to take a course on designing my own retirement. Find out what kind of topics courses like this cover.