Introduction

1. Retirement Is Your Vacation of a Lifetime

The deal was too good to pass up.

At the least, that’s what Frank and Trish thought when they first signed up for their Caribbean cruise. From the moment they stepped into the cabin, however, they knew something was wrong.

First off, their cabin didn’t even remotely resemble the one in the picture. Second, the in-cabin display said their first stop was Puerto Rico, which was not on the itinerary they had been given. They took their concerns to the crew, but they were no help, insisting that the display was wrong. This didn’t exactly put Frank and Trish at ease, but with little other choice, they headed back to their cabin, and the ship got underway—barely.

As it turned out, the ship was broken. Frank and Trish were stuck in open waters on a ship that could hardly propel itself forward. Not only that, but the crew had lied. The trip was supposed to be to a private Caribbean island and several other ports; the ship was headed for Puerto Rico, and they had saved for a year just for this experience. Eventually, the ship made port—literally crashing into the dock in the process. The crew then asked all the passengers to disembark so they could check the ship and told them to come back around five o’clock.

Frank and Trish returned at five as instructed, and they were immediately told to get on board with the rest of the passengers so they could depart.

“How the hell can you leave?” Frank said. “You just hit a dock.”

“Don’t worry, the rest of your trip is going to be fine,” a crewmember said, offering no other explanation.

The rest of the trip was not fine.

Almost immediately after getting underway, the crew informed them that because of the lost time, they couldn’t make any more of the planned stops on the trip—and they would be offering no refunds. At this point, the passengers were in open revolt, openly antagonizing the crew and demanding some semblance of an explanation. Instead, they just got more bad news: the ship’s busted engine had only gotten worse, and the ship wasn’t going to make port in Fort Lauderdale in time for anyone to make their return flights home.

The crew opened up the ship’s Wi-Fi to allow passengers to make other arrangements, book new flights, and find a hotel for the night. Unfortunately, as the passengers soon discovered, it was Bike Week in Daytona—there were no vacancies within a two-hundred-mile range.

Eventually, Frank and Trish found an Airbnb about seventy-five miles away. A few more ship-related fiascos later, and the couple had disembarked and were on their way to the Airbnb. When they arrived around ten o’clock that night, they found themselves locked out. The key code didn’t work, and the owner was nowhere to be seen.

Then the lawn sprinklers came on.

When they finally got into the house around midnight, they found the inside trashed. The beds weren’t made, dishes were everywhere, and nothing was put away. They got a few hours of sleep, and then packed back up so they could make their 6:00 a.m. flight back home—a flight they had to pay extra for, since their original flight was nonrefundable.

Hands down, it was the worst trip of Frank and Trish’s lives, a cartoonishly bad experience that left them and their bank accounts reeling. The worst part is, they first got the idea for a trip like that on the recommendation of some friends.

Not too long before, this other couple had found an amazing travel package of their own, thanks to a recommendation from their travel agent. For over a week, they lounged around in their huge suite at a beautiful resort in Mexico. There, they spent as much time as they could in the resort’s sprawling pool, complete with a swim-up bar that they took full advantage of since, as it turned out, the booze was included in the travel package. When they came back, they said it was the best trip of their lives.

Quite the contrast in experiences, isn’t it?

Now, pretend these stories weren’t about two different vacations but rather about your retirement.

Ask yourself, which retirement would you prefer—and what steps are you taking to get there?

Retirement Planning Doesn’t Have to Be Scary

Often when we ask new clients what they want out of their retirement, I get a shrug. The very idea feels complex, overwhelming, and far away. Some want to focus on enjoying the present and, as a result, feel they’ll never be able to afford retirement. Many have not even thought about what retirement looks like and what they will do. Others are interested in acting but don’t know where to start. Still others worry that it’s too late to do anything that will prevent them from outliving their retirement savings.

These are all reasonable concerns. After all, saving for retirement today is a lot different than it was for previous generations, when the average life span was much shorter. Whereas a person might retire at sixty-five and then pass away at seventy or seventy-five, today, it’s common for people to retire at fifty-five and live into their nineties.

Many people will be retired for as long as they worked, if not longer. A five- to ten-year retirement may have been common in the past, but today the average is closer to twenty or thirty years. Moreover, today people view retirement as a transition into something new, rather than an end. People are doing much more professionally, recreationally, and socially later in life than in previous generations. That’s a lot of life to plan for, and yet many of us are essentially leaving our retirement plans to chance.

In a 2014 survey of one thousand retirement savers conducted for Charles Schwab, more than half those surveyed said they had spent five hours or more doing research the last time they bought a car, and 39 percent said they spent more than five hours exploring vacation possibilities. Only 11 percent said they had spent that amount of time evaluating investment options for their 401(k) plans. In fact, around one-third of savers said they spent less than an hour on investment research.1

If you want to enjoy your retirement years, you have to put the same amount of effort planning for them as you would for a vacation. If you don’t, you may end up on the vacation from hell, just like our friends Frank and Trish did. Sadly, for a growing number of Americans, this is exactly the reality they face.

In early 2018, about 12.4 percent of the population aged sixty-five or older was still in the workforce, up from 3 percent in 2000.2 Far too many people are being forced to delay their retirements—or in some cases, not get one. While there’s nothing wrong with staying in the workforce as long as you’d like (I personally plan to work until I am no longer able), there is a big difference between wanting to work and having to work.

All It Takes Is a Plan

Over the last thirty years, our team at Carver Financial Services has helped thousands of people design and implement a plan for enjoying today while having the future they dream of. This book will give you the tools you need to design, implement, and live the retirement that you want. No matter where you are in your life, no matter how much money you’ve currently saved up, there is a path forward for you to turn your retirement years into the vacation of a lifetime.

To make your dream vacation a reality, begin with defining your goals. Just as it’s not enough to say, “I want to take a trip” and leave it at that, it’s not enough to say, “I want to retire” either. Sure, the occasional spontaneous trip can be fun, but retirement isn’t just some spontaneous trip. If you want to get the most out of it, you need to take a systematic approach. This starts by asking yourself some basic questions:

• Where do you want to go? What’s important to you? What do you want to do with all that free time? Would you spend your time on the golf course? Would you get a part-time job? Would you and your spouse buy an RV and travel the country? Or would you live a quiet life at home, reading books and tending to your garden?
• What’s the best route? There are plenty of ways to get from point A to point B. First, that means understanding your point A—where you are right now. Next, you need to decide what’s important to you about the journey. Perhaps you want to take a slower, more scenic route; perhaps you want to get there as quickly as possible.
• How do you want to get there? Once you’ve answered the first two questions, you can start thinking about what vehicle might be best to get you there. Too often, I’ll see people start with the vehicle rather than the destination. But while a Ferrari might be an awesome car, it’s the wrong vehicle if you’re going off-roading—just like a mutual fund might be the wrong vehicle, depending on your retirement plans.
• What do you want to do when you get there? It’s great if you’ve decided you want to head to...