Better lighting is a change you can make now that’s an immediate benefit now and will also help in latter life. As we get older, our eyes can simply use a little extra help. This isn’t needed all the time, but if you have extra lighting, it can be great when you need it.

You can install adjustable lighting that can make a room really bright when you need it but will let you dial the light back at other times. You can also install additional task lighting at your work areas or your home office desk or workbench, over the kitchen sink and under kitchen cabinets.

Adding lighting to your front porch will help you see better who might be at the front door. And adding low voltage outdoor lighting along your front walkway will help everyone from your older friends to trick or treaters make it to your front door safely. A floodlight with a motion detector at the end of your driveway and at your back door will make walking safer at night for you also.

Other changes you might want to consider include grab rails in the bathroom, lever style door handles and wider doorways that can accommodate a wheelchair later on. These changes are much less expensive to make if you’re doing some remodeling anyway. Some day you might need to add a ramp to reach that front door, also.

For many of us, needing such accommodations to limited mobility may be years and years away, or we might never need them. The point is – if retirement is still a few years down the road – keep these needs in mind if you’re planning to do some remodeling soon. It can make life more pleasant now and can save money later on.

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First up is a little advance planning. Think about what changes will make life easier for you 10 or 20 years down the road. If you’re a bit of a handy-man, now is the time to begin to make needed alterations, while you’re young enough to do the work yourself. If you don’t enjoy doing your own work or don’t seem to have the time now for some remodeling, now is also the ideal time when you have a full-time income to pay for others to make the changes for you.

Most of the changes you will need to make fall under the general heading of accessibility and mobility. Whether we like to think about it or not, our bodies aren’t as flexible, and we aren’t able to get around as well when we’re 70 as when we’re 50. A few adaptations can make life much easier.

If you’ve been thinking of remodeling the bathroom, now might be a great time. But instead of putting in that Jacuzzi or garden tub, with the high sides that are hard to get into and harder to get out of, consider something like the walk-in tub from Safety Tubs. It has adjustable power jets for a soothing massage, like a spa tub. But it also has a door in the side to make getting into and out of it much easier.

As a matter of fact, many older American’s find it very difficult to get into and out of a conventional bathtub safely. Garden spa tubs are even more difficult. Many older folks end up only being able to use a shower. A tub like the Safety Tub will be a Godsend if mobility or bending ever becomes a problem for you.

Stairs can be a problem, whether it’s 3 steps up to a front porch or living in a two-story house. I found this out the hard way about 10 years ago when I had knew surgery. I never did learn how to climb stairs on crutches. It made me realize how big a barrier stairs can be to those with limited mobility.

For a permanent solution to getting up and down the stairs, you can install a chair-type stair lift. Do-It-Yourself models start from $2,000 up, such as the Ameriglide. Deluxe models installed by professionals can cost thousands of dollars more. Installing a stair lift can indeed cost a considerable amount of money, but it’s a lot less trouble than moving from a two-story house you like to a one-story house just because you can no longer climb the stairs.

We’ll continue discussing practical changes you can make to your home to adapt it for your later years tomorrow.

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New retirement communities are still being developed in Florida and Arizona. Del Webb is now developing Sun City Festival in Arizona, a 3,000 acre site designed to eventually be home to 7,200 households. But now not only are retirement communities growing in Florida and Arizona, they are now popping up in other Sun Belt states like Texas and New Mexico. But what’s really amazing is the development of retirement communities in such northern locales as Michigan, Massachusetts and Illinois.

Several things are driving this trend. Many retirees want to downsize from the house where they raised their families. They simply no longer need all that space, so they’re looking for a smaller house. They like the amenities planned retirement communities offer.

At the same time, many folks have realized they don’t want to move half way across the country from their children and grandchildren, better weather or not. How much fun is being able to play golf in January if there’s a new grandbaby you only get to see once or twice a year because of the distance.

The booming real estate market of the last few years, particularly in the Northeast, has driven home equity up to all-time highs. But if you sell your house to capture the equity, where do you go when you buy a smaller house? People moving out of larger houses can afford to relocate to a planned retirement community, but in what part of the country?

Oak Point in Massachusetts is a great example of this new trend of Northeastern retirement communities. It has the community clubhouse and shuffleboard courts you would expect in a 55+ community in the Sun Belt. It has almost all the amenities you’d find in a Florida or Arizona retirement community except the weather.

But it’s not just shuffleboard and bocce ball. Since Oak Pointe is also designed for active seniors, you can wait for the snow to melt in the heated swimming pool and the state-of-the-art fitness center. You also don’t have to shovel the snow: the maintenance staff does it. It’s all included in the price. When you want some big city excitement, Boston is less than an hour away by car or bus. If you want a day at the beach, Cape Cod is also an hour’s drive away.

Especially for those with children in the area, and for those who enjoy the cultural amenities of the Boston area, retirement in the North makes great sense. Even a few folks who were living in the Sun Belt have now moved into some of these Northern retirement communities. Who could have imagined that a few years ago?

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It can be one of the best retirement investing strategies you can have, because it can pay huge dividends. It can open our eyes to the reality of living in a new place full-time. This is the kind of information you need to know before you spend serious money to ship your furniture cross-country to a new area.

Let’s say you visited Phoenix in the winter and dreamed of not having to shovel snow for days on end. I lived in Arizona for 5 years, and there is a lot to like about Arizona. My mother-in-law still lives there.

Winter is very pleasant in Phoenix. But are you ready for 120 degree days in the summer, when your feet stick to the pavement of asphalt parking lots, and the steering wheel in your car gets so hot from being parked in the sun, that you can get blisters on your hands from touching it?

Yes, I know you can buy a cover to keep your steering wheel cooler. But the point is, to fully experience an area you might be considering making a permanent move to, you need to test it out for at least 12 months first. Experience all the seasons, so you can see the good and the bad.

Some people love the heat in Phoenix. Some people spend the entire summer under an air conditioner and never go outside, at least in the daytime. If you like to walk for exercise, you’ll have to do it at 5am, like my mother-in-law, before it gets unbearably hot. Only you know what you like and what you can’t put up with.

So…before you make a permanent move, check out your new area by renting there for a year. Granted - it is extra trouble and maybe a little extra expense, but it can save you from making a very costly mistake. Get to know the neighborhoods and the city. Find out about development plans. You will be able to gather the kind of information you need to make an informed decision. If you rent first and then you decide not to move, you’ll still have your house back where you came from to go back to.

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One of the big benefits you get by renting in an area before you buy is you’ll get to know the various neighborhoods. This is especially important if you’re not buying in an age restricted retirement community. In a retirement community, at least you know what kind of development will be going on around you.

If you buy in a regular neighborhood in a town in, say, the Sun Belt, you could be in for a rude surprise. If you rent first in your new area, it will give you time to find out what the future development plans are for the area you’re considering. If you’ll start reading the newspaper and watching the local TV news, you can learn some very valuable information.

For example, when we moved to the town where we live now, we almost bought a particular house because it was close to the local high school and had beautiful open fields behind the house. It was only by a little research and a lot of luck that we found out that the city was about to build a huge community recreational park on that field.

Now behind the house we almost bought are youth baseball fields with stands full of screaming parents and tennis courts lighted to at least 10 o’clock every night with huge floodlights. And right next to that, they built a new football stadium for the high school last year.

The beautiful back yard of that house is now as bright as daylight at 10 pm, and the floodlights shine right into the back windows of the house. And of course, if we had bought that house and decided we wanted to sell it later because of these distractions, it would be worth a lot less than we would have paid for it.

Tomorrow we’ll talk about getting to know the realities of living in a new area.

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Dale Carnegie tells the story of a speech given by Dr. William Osler, founder of the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. Dr. Osler spoke to students at Yale on the secret of his success. He said he wasn’t smarter than the average person. Instead he said his success secret was to live in “day-tight compartments”.

Dr. Osler told how he had taken an ocean voyage back in the days of the great Atlantic steamships. The ship’s captain took Dr. Osler to the bridge of the ship and showed him how, with the pull of a single lever, he could activate machinery to close doors throughout the ship and divide the ship into watertight compartments. This was a great advance in making ocean voyages safer.

Dr. Osler urged his audience to take control of the machinery of their low lives and to divide their lives into “day-tight compartments” for the voyage through life. He said to seal off the dead past with its mistakes, and to seal off, for now, the future also, because the only time we can control is today.

Dr. Osler didn’t say not to prepare for the future. He said that the best possible way to prepare for the future was to concentrate on making today as productive and meaningful as possible.

That’s great advice for retirement planning and life in general. It works for retirement planning if you have 30 years left before retirement. It also works if you’re already retired. We need to make today the best day we can. We can’t change the past, and we can’t act in the future until we get there. Whether it’s retirement planning or any plans for the future, we can only act today to make tomorrow better. Like it says in the song, let’s resolve to live “One Day at a Time”.

Christy Lane

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So before this blog begins to sound like a dry financial planning textbook, let’s talk about some related things. What about retirement planning and planning for the future in general?

In the Sermon on the Mount in the Kings James version so many of us are familiar with, Jesus says:

“Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself.” (Matt. 6:25)

When most of us hear these words, we understand them to mean Jesus was saying you don’t have to plan ahead. I even heard a man once who was bragging that he didn’t have any life insurance, and he justified it based on this Bible verse. That might be fine for him. He wouldn’t be around to suffer the consequences, but what about his survivors?

I got out my copy of Dale Carnegie’s great book “How to Stop Worrying and Start Living” because I remembered he discussed this. Dale Carnegie says that when the KJV was written 400 years ago, “thought” frequently meant “anxiety”. So the verse is really better translated “have no anxiety for tomorrow” or “don’t worry about tomorrow”.

The New International Version puts it this way in :

“Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life…Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life?” Matt. 6:25-27

What does this mean for retirement planning? Dale Carnegie says, by all means yes, you should think about tomorrow and do some careful planning and preparation. What Jesus was saying was - don’t spend your time worrying about tomorrow.

Planning is productive, both retirement planning and other planning for the future. Worrying is not. That was great advice 2,000 years ago. It’s still great advice today.

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Step 5 - Adjust for Social Security. You’ll notice I left a discussion of Social Security to last. Much has been written recently and much has been said recently, especially by politicians, about the future of Social Security. If you’re within a few years of retirement age, Social Security may be as close as it gets to guaranteed for you. If you’re in your 20’s or early 30’s, it’s anyone’s guess. That makes it a purely personal decision whether to take Social Security into consideration when making your retirement investment plans. Regardless, the math is simple. If you haven’t received a statement from Social Security recently showing your projected payments at retirement, you can call 800-722-1213, you can visit your local Social Security Office to submit a request, or you can go to www.ssa.gov/mystatement.

Let’s say that your payments are estimated to be $1,100 per month. Because of tax savings, that might be worth $1,300 per month of ordinary income. So if your calculations show you need $5,000 a month in income, you could reduce that to $3,700 per month or $44,400 per year. From Step 4, if your pension plan is going to cover $30,960, that means you have to save to make up the $13,440 difference. Once again that’s $13,440/8 x 100 = $168,000 as your savings goal. From the FinAid.org calculator, that would require saving $175 per month. Now this is beginning to sound very doable.

Finally, what about inflation? It does reduce the buying power of your dollars in the future. We already adjusted for inflation in using only an 8% real return after inflation rather than the 13% you often hear quoted for the gain in stocks over the last 50 years, which does include inflation. Still if your pension plan payments are fixed once you retire, the value of your payments will be less each year. So to be conservative for inflation, you can reduce the value of your pension plan payments by 30% when you do your calculations.

There are 2 other simple ways to do address inflation. First, the calculations in the steps above are based on building up money in a 401(k) plan or other tax deferred investment program. The calculations shown in the example are also based on drawing out interest and leaving the principal alone. 401(k) plan rules require that you begin drawing out money by the time you’re 72, if you haven’t begun already. Withdrawing some principal will help cover some of the cost of inflation.

Second, you can always adjust for inflation by using a lower rate of return than the 8% we used in our example for your own retirement savings plan calculations. It’s not an exact science. No one can predict the rate of inflation for the next 10 or 20 years with any degree of certainty. We can only predict trends for the future based on the past. So use prudent judgment and adjust the assumptions for how conservative you want to be.

Finally, what do you do if your calculations show you need to save say $500 a month, and you can only save $200 a month? What you do next is critical! Don’t put off getting started until you can afford to save the entire $500 a month! If you put off saving until you can afford it some time in the future, that time may never come, but retirement will eventually come. So - whatever amount you can put aside, get started today!

I hope this brief series has been helpful. Any comments or thoughts you have are certainly welcome and will be appreciated.

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* Retirement Planning
* Different kinds of Retirement Saving Accounts
* 401(k) Accounts
* Borrowing against retirement savings
* Finding money to invest for retirement
* Dollar Cost Averaging

I’m not a CPA or tax attorney or lawyer. So don’t treat what I’m saying as some kind of tax or investment advice coming from a professional. I’m just a person who’s being doing a lot of reading lately, and I think I’m beginning to understand some of this stuff. I trust that putting down on paper what I’ve been reading will also help me clarify my own thoughts. For professional advice, you should see a CPA or other tax or investment professional. That’s what I do. I learned to hard way to use a CPA for my taxes after I got audited a few years ago and found out I had managed to get confused on a few things when using do it yourself tax software.

But then life, and retirement, is not all about money, so I plan to write about other things also. I’ve been reading a lot about retirement lifestyles lately, things like selecting a retirement community and staying healthy in your retirement years.

I plan for this blog to be a useful place to post what I’ve learned, and I also want it to be a place where you can also share what you’ve learned, and what you’ve been thinking about retirement and retirement planning. If you’re already retired, I’d love to have you share your thoughts also. Right now retirement is still in the future for me so all my thoughts are theoretical. If you’re retired now, I’d love to hear about the reality of retirement.

To start with, I’ll be posting a number of topics on the financial side of retirement and retirement planning, as well as links to news articles about retirement. After that, I plan to discuss retirement communities and other options – things like should you move when you retire, or would it be better to stay where you’re living now. After that, we’ll see where it goes from there.

Please feel free to comment, and I hope you enjoy it. You can follow the series by checking back in here often.

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