I’m a goal setter. You might have guessed that by now if you read ye olde blogge regularly. I don’t see me setting less goals once I retire. In fact, I see even more of this happening.

I come by this naturally.

My mother was forever learning new things and setting goals for herself.

Mom had a bad back and went through several surgeries in her 30s and 40s. In her early 50s she was diagnosed with degenerative disc disease and told she’d be in a wheelchair within 5 years. Once the doctor told her she couldn’t injure her back any further (so she might as well do whatever she wanted), Mom trained for and obtained her lifeguard certification (at age 54) and started teaching aqua aerobics. This led to her eventually supervising the pool full-time at a local seniors’ facility. When my dad died suddenly, her back flared up again and she had to leave that job.

Still not in a wheelchair, she started working at my (then) workplace, in a support role. Then her cancer diagnosis put her into an actual retirement.

Even then she was into doing new things. She decided to take up the guitar and taught herself some new crafts. As I mentioned a few days earlier on ye olde blogge, she also took up volunteering at her local cancer clinic and in Emerg.

In her “spare time”, she knit and crocheted chemo caps and squares to be sewn into warm blankets for people undergoing their infusions.

Still not in a wheelchair, she and my stepdad enjoyed travelling with their camping group and spending summers down at the lake in their ever-changing lineup of travel trailers. Mom walked or biked around the park every day to keep fit.

She didn’t actually end up in a wheelchair until the last few months of her life, and then only when she became too tired to walk more than a few steps at a time. She was 79 years old and finally in that damn wheelchair, 25 years later.

Even after she refused further treatment and knew she was dying shortly, she was still knitting and crocheting for her first great-grandbaby. To add variety to her day, Mom had also taken up another new hobby to keep her mind busy as her body was failing her – colouring in adult colouring books! My son framed 3 of her coloured-in mandala pages as gift for my stepdad, at her request. She had a goal to complete this before she died so he could have this as a Christmas gift from her. Mom died a week before Christmas 2015 but those mandalas were completed first. Oh, yes!

See what I mean about goals? With an example like that to follow, I can’t NOT have any no matter what age or condition I am in.

Rock on,

The WB

Housekeeping AGAIN (sigh): People (not me anymore) are still facing the white screen of death when trying to comment, unfortunately. I will try to figure this out this weekend though I don’t know where to begin. Please bear with me – I love your comments! I’m not even getting spam anymore. Who knew I would ever miss spam?!?!?!?

I have decided to live until at least 90, then re-evaluate my situation every 10 years after that. Of course, this flies in the face of my shitty family genetics, which includes lots of cancer and heart disease. No matter.

So that means I will be retired for a long, long time.

A lot can happen during that amount of time – a lot that I won’t be able to plan for. Think about how much the world has changed in the past 35 years. Try to imagine how much it will change during the next 35 years.

I think it is of the utmost importance to remain flexible at all times, and I ain’t talking about yoga. It’s all well and good to have a plan for retirement but shit will does happen. So contingencies and adaptability are musts.

I usually like to have Plans B, C and maybe even D as backups when enacting a major Plan A scenario. I imagine the worst that could happen if Plan A didn’t work out…can I live with having to enact Plan B instead?

Let’s say for some reason I had lost all of my retirement savings and had to rely only on the Canada Pension. My Plan B would be to liquidate my assets (my home being the major one) to free up some spare cash, find a cheap apartment (or room) to rent and maybe even pick up some work if I wanted some mad money (or the Canada Pension went belly up). I’d scale back my lifestyle as much as I had to…it isn’t grand to begin with, but I could always go back to the way I lived when I was poorer. I know I would survive, and still find life cool and interesting. Because I have done this throughout my life.

I can’t predict the future (damn damn damn) but I predict I can get through life. I’ve managed so far despite abusive relationships, little money, and shouldering most, if not all, of the load. See this post.

I know I have that resilience and flexibility, that adaptability that is needed to weather life’s storms now, at my current age.

I hope I can retain this going forward. Attitude is everything…nay…it’s the ONLY thing that we have total control over.

Rock on,

The WB

Ahhhh….the dreaded B word! B is for budget which is also for boring, banal, bothersome.

If you were like the old me, you absolutely recoiled at the idea of a budget. There was never any money left over after paying for necessities anyway! What was the point!? Except to hammer home the message that there wasn’t enough money left over for the things I was supposed to be doing, like putting money into emergency funds, RRSPs, and home renovations!

But that was then and this, delightedly, is now. I love working on my budget. I never got what a budget was about, really, until I had to deal with one for work.

A budget is simply a forecast of where the money will be going in a given time period. That’s all. It’s not set in stone. It’s not to the penny – that’s too much math, even for me. It’s not the law. It’s what you see happening with your money over X months (or a year). You da boss. You set the budget based on what you want to do with your money (after necessities are covered, of course). You change it as you see fit. Duh. Why did I not get this before?

About a year ago I found a great budget worksheet online (available in various formats such as Excel and Open Office) that I use to create that picture of what is going on with my hard-earned dough. Here’s where I found it:

http://www.mymoneycoach.ca/budgeting/budgeting-calculators-tools/budgeting-spreadsheet

I love this spreadsheet because it does all the thinking (and math) for you. Not only that  – it tells you how you compare to other Canadians in terms of percentages you are spending on housing, food, transportation etc.

The first time I used it – once the dust had settled (literally and figuratively) from my widowhood and major renovation projects – when I got to the end of the sheet it told me that I had leftover $$ “that needed a job”! That, my friends, was thrilling! I immediately set up a monthly automatic savings plan to transfer the excess bucks from my regular chequing account into my Tangerine account. Not as much as the spreadsheet was telling me, in case I had missed or understated some expenses, but enough to feel good about finally being able to set up that emergency savings account. Since then I have finished some recurring payments (car loan, I am looking at you!) and now that money “needed a job” too – I have also set up a travel account and a tax free savings account – both of which get regular deposits from my chequing account. Painless saving and oh-so-satisfying to watch those balances grow.*

So what has this got to do with planning retirement you might be asking at this point? Well, it’s never too late to start understanding your money situation and there is no better way to do it than with a budget. Knowledge is power, and having a budget gives me the power to make the right decisions (for me) about my spending leading up to retirement. It also is giving me great data on what exactly I need to live on in my current situation and that’s good intel for the future!

Rock on,

The WB

*What about your RRSP,  WB? (You might be asking.) Well, the small widow’s pension I started receiving since JD died I have transferred automatically into an RRSP account each month. I don’t miss it because I never had it to use, before. This combined with my employer matching my deductions from my paycheque into my work-held RRSP means I am saving almost the max allowable each year for me. And I recently instructed my financial planner at my bank to up that amount to make sure I am hitting that max. Better late than never, sez I.