Retirement: You Might Need to Visualize It to Realize It
August 25, 2014As a financial planner, I feel that it is important to encourage people to realistically think about what their retirement will look like. No matter how young or old, now is always a good time to plan for the future. It is not uncommon for some of these popular questions to come up during a typical conversation:
- What do you look forward to the most?
- When do you realistically plan on retiring?
- Where will you live?
- How much income will you need to do the things you want to do?
Unfortunately, too many people these days are delaying actually getting started following through with a basic plan for retirement. To help move the needle and encourage people to save more for retirement, Merrill Edge® introduced a mobile app called Face Retirement. The whole purpose of this app is help people do more than just visualize future retirement goals. The purpose is to actually visualize what you will look like when you are older. I guess that should be another question to add to the previous list of things to ask during the retirement planning process.
What will you look like when you’re older?
The whole idea of aging apps such as Face Retirement is to help people see what their future selves will look like. If you are brave and your 3-D self doesn’t look more like Darth Sidious from the Star Wars saga than the current version of you like mine did, you can even choose to share your image with friends and family using social media. You can also see what the future cost of living will look like and learn more about saving and investing for the future.
Ask yourself, how much am I saving for retirement? The interesting thing with aging apps is that they are backed by research that shows people actually save more after being faced with an image of their future selves. Perhaps an important aspect of being able to save for the future is related to personality traits such as a future time perspective that can affect our ability to set goals for the future and actually follow through with them.
Whatever your feelings may be regarding your current state of retirement preparedness, it is essential to think about your retirement goals. Then take things a step further and run a basic retirement calculation at least once a year. If you think that retirement is too far away then just hop on over to the Face Retirement site and give their aging app a quick look. But try to do more than just visualize what you will look like during retirement. Take some time to actually visualize what your dream retirement will look like. Turning those dreams into a future reality can begin with a few small steps in the right direction.