Live Your Pre-Retirement Life

By Brent Meyer — SafeMoney.com Founder & Editor Reviewed by Licensed Financial Professionals  |  SafeMoney.com — Trusted Since 2011  |  Updated Regularly Quick Answer: Discover how to live your pre-retirement life effectively. Plan for a secure retirement with safe money alternatives. Start preparing today! You’re thinking about retirement. Maybe you have 5-10 years left to prepare for this exciting change. It’s time to consider what you need to do to ensure you have sufficient money for the retirement lifestyle you want. Let’s assume you and your partner have talked about your retirement expectations and know how much you will need, how much you have, and a plan for reaching those financial goals. Then you can take these final years before retirement to prepare and ensure that you are able to enjoy retirement. Let’s get into some of the issues you and your partner should be thinking about as you approach your post-work years. The Softer Side of Preparing This article focuses on being financially prepared. But you should also think about what you are going to do with your time. Years of working toward the goal of retirement may leave you looking forward to not having demands on your time. However, as life expectancies have increased, you may have 30 or more years. That is a long time to have at your leisure. If you have spent 40 years with a career that helped to frame your identity, you may want to think about what you’re going to do to find fulfillment. If you have your plan and have selected your retirement date, you might start to feel like you are in limbo. Or it may be a grueling exercise, just counting down the years, months, and days until freedom. There are some practical steps you can take in the meantime to ensure that you are financially prepared to enjoy the retirement you’ve been working toward for so long. The Dark Side of Preparing for Retirement Avoiding estate planning is a common habit. No one wants to confront their own mortality and prepare a will and testament. However, as Hank Coleman recommends in his article  “Top 5 Reasons Why You Need a Last Will and Testament,” on the website MoneyQandA.com , there are many reasons to prepare your will in advance. This includes taking control of what you want to happen after you pass, instead of leaving it up to the courts to decide. Pay Off Debt While you are still earning a full salary, pay off your debts. When you retire, in most cases, your inco