What ingredients are in your recipe?

I previously made mention that it is important that during the planning of your retirement that you include your spouse. What a concept! You would think this would be automatic, but I will bet you that there are a lot of folks out there that have a mental model of what retirement will be that is nowhere close to the mental model their spouse has. That is a recipe for disaster. I guess there are lots of reasons that this might be the case. I think I know what my wife wants to do in retirement, but it is a topic we never quite get to and it always seems to get pushed off to another day. I guess because there is some finality in this type of discussion and because we think we have a long time before we actually retire, we see no hurry in getting this task completed. The reality is that retirement will be here before we know it. I am going to do a little experiment to see just how aligned my mental model of retirement is with my wife’s. Today I am going to list the top ten things that I want to do when I retire (at least I am going to try). I will then ask my wife to list her top ten things. I will not show her my list until she has completed hers. I will post her list later this week so you can all see how we stack up. I guess it will be obvious at that point if we have a wing and a prayer. Keep your fingers crossed...

My top 10 things to do in retirement – not in any particular order:

1. See a baseball game in every major league baseball statdium
2. Visit Ireland
3. Golf
4. Visit the grand kids often (I hope)
5. Vacation on the beach a couple of times a year
6. Have a get away in the mountains or off the beat and path where I can just gin around
7. Take a cruise in Alaska
8. Go back to Aruba
9. Buy a pontoon boat and fish
10. Live in a mild climate (no snow)

Stay tuned… Mrs. Sam is about to enter the building.