Financial goals don’t need to be big

We talk a lot about ‘goals’ in life, on and off the football pitch.

Lifestyle goals, career goals, financial goals.

But are goals the be-all-and-end-all?

Take retirement ‘goals’. People might worry and think “Well I don’t want to travel the world/write a book/start a business when I retire. I’d just like to stay at home and see the grandchildren. Have a bit of a breather.”

Especially at this point in time. After the year we’ve had, a breather sounds like a great idea to me!

Many of us are enjoying more than ever the basics of good health, security and reassurance. We’ve had a year to ‘smell the roses’ and found that it’s actually rather nice.

For example, the airlines may be opening up, but flying is the last thing many people want to do! Instead of leaping onto a plane, as we might have done previously without much thought, many of us are considering holidaying in British Isles instead.

So do you really need a financial plan, if there’s no dramatic end goal in sight?

Of course! Because apart from the fact that you still need to make sure you have enough to live the lifestyle you’d like, you might discover something you really want that you hadn’t consciously realised before…

Some new clients who came to see me in October were originally planning on retiring in 2026. They had their hearts set on this and were all geared towards it as a convenient date. 

They were five years away from retirement and wanted to review their position for the first time. They wanted to know “Are we in good shape? Is there anything we should be doing? How does Drawdown work?” etc. 

We then started off by looking at their cashflow to try and reassure them about their real question, which is the one everyone has: “Are we going to be ok?”

The answer was they were going to be more than ok. They had more than their original planned yearly expenditure, they had more for two holidays a year and enough for a comfortable safety net.

These are the elements that mattered to them the most, which gave them the reassurance they needed. 

The most recent meeting was going to be the last

But right at the last minute, they asked me if they’d be able to retire a year earlier.

I re-worked some calculations and discovered that yes, they could. 

I could tell immediately that this was welcome news. I could see that a weight had been lifted from them. They were almost completely different people.

But, you might ask, why didn’t they ask this sooner, if that’s what they wanted?

And this, I think, is the key point. Not everyone knows what they really want until they go through this process. Not everyone dares to think of the impossible, to stretch their ambitions and think up dramatic goals for retirement. Most people just want to know they’re going to be ok. But once they discover the answer to that, then a lightbulb goes off, and it’s almost as if they then have permission to think a bit more wildly.

Without the work they’d done up to that point, it might not have been possible for them to even get to the stage where they considered early retirement. 

Going through all that work gave them the confidence to think a bit bigger.

And even though a year might not seem like much, it’s better to have it in your 50s when you can enjoy it to the full, rather than at 93, when you may not be so sprightly.

So the lesson from me is: Life your own life! Don’t work until 67 just because everyone else is. Think outside the box and consider what you really want from life. That might not necessarily mean going bungee jumping over Victoria Falls, it could just mean buying a year of your freedom back.

Many people find this hard, but there’s no need to think big right away. Sometimes it’s the tortoise that wins the race.