So, you’ve done great planning and you know what you want to do next. You’ve outlined your steps; maybe you have even set a date for your retirement. Then comes the great 2008 financial meltdown. But what now?
If you’re like most of us you spent last week holding your breath as you watched the stock market dive – not just the US stock market but stock markets all over the world. And you watched the savings that you spent years and years putting away dissolve.
Terrifying.
So, what does this mean for all the planning you’ve been doing about what you’re going to do when you retire? I think one of the lessons of this is that you have to be flexible about your plans. You don’t need to give them up but you need to figure out how to make them work in a new environment.
Surviving the Meltdown
Financial planners are saying that right now our most valuable asset is our ability to bring in a stream of income. That is, the job that we have now is what enables us to continue to live as we have. It’s not our stock portfolios or our homes that pay the day-to-day bills, it’s our paychecks.
So that makes giving up the job that you’ve probably looked longingly to give up for so long much less practical. But it doesn’t mean that you have to give up on your plans and your dreams for how you’re going to reinvent yourself for your next stage of life. Instead, what it means is that you have to figure out how to move forward without losing your income stream.
Keeping the income stream
There are a number of ways to maintain your income stream while you move forward with your plans to reinvent your work life.
For some people it means that they go to school at night while they are still working so that they can pick up new skills. For others it means that they spend their after work hours developing their new enterprise while they continue to bring in the income that allows them to live and move forward with their dreams.
Some people will choose to stay in the job that they have now but work fewer hours. They might then negotiate with their employer to cut back their hours as they start to create a new income stream, or they might negotiate to retire but come back as a consultant.
For a great many people who are looking forward to retirement, what they’re looking forward to is to creating their own work – working for themselves rather than working for someone else. The good news about this goal is that it lends itself well to a gradual transition. You can be in control of the timing.
Transitions
People often think of transitions as ending one thing and starting the next thing right away. There really aren’t all that many transitions that are like that. Far more often, there are gaps or overlaps or false starts or experiments that don’t quite work or unexpected things that happen and things that work better than you ever could have imagined.
I don’t think there is any entrepreneur who would say that they needed less startup time than they took. I think almost everybody would say that they needed more. So if you’re planning on starting your own business, think of this as a long ramp up time. It almost always takes more time to bring in money than you were expecting.
So now that it’s clear that you’re not going to be able to make this transition in exactly the way you wanted to do it, how do you keep the focus on what’s important to you? How do you sustain that when you’re not able to make that leap out of that job that you were in to the next thing as quickly or as cleanly as you’d planned?
Moving forward with your plans
So, as you look at what you’re going to do next, you need to think about how can you move forward with what you want to do in this changed environment.
Keep in mind – every day – what your goals are. Remember the direction that you are taking and find ways to move yourself forward on a consistent basis. Some steps are small: reading what others are writing about what you want to do, talking with someone who’s already doing that kind of work, doing pragmatic things like applying for a business license. There are all kinds of ways to move forward… an endless list of things to do that take you closer to your goals.
Make a plan and a timetable for the things you want to accomplish. You can revise these as needed, but just having a plan will help keep you moving.
Making your plans more flexible
There are always things that come up that you hadn’t thought about. There are always considerations or changes in the environment that mean that you have to make revisions. That’s ok, just keep your eye on where you’re headed and keep yourself moving forward.
We get to where we want to go only if we can be flexible enough to see that there are many paths.
Contributed by guest writer Kathie G. Larsen, Ph.D.
Kathie is a clinical psychologist in private practice in Seattle, Washington.
