What Do You Do About Retirement Planning In The Later Stages Of Your Life?

This phase begins at age 70 and lasts as long as you are able-bodied and high-functioning. Despite your good health, it is helpful to begin looking at what steps you would like your family to take should your condition decline significantly. In most cases your ability to make all your own decisions, care for yourself, engage with the world on your terms, and manage your affairs does not vanish in a split second. The loss of abilities is the natural consequence of the aging process and often happens gradually. At the same time, it is our nature as human beings to resist letting go of our autonomy. Even talking about the possibility is avoided. It takes courage to dive into a conversation about giving up and transferring control.

During this phase, it is common that one member of a couple will be the primary caretaker for the other whose health has already declined. If you are that caretaker, you will need to take care of yourself, see our previous blogs. Communicate with family members and build a team of professionals around you to advise and help as needed, such as Senior Life Care Planning.

The last phase of retirement planning begins when your health has taken a turn for the worse and there is little likelihood of it being fully restored. You require significant help to function day to day. The hope is that by this point all the planning done in prior years makes this transition as manageable and life-affirming as possible. No one knows ahead of time how his or her life will come to an end. It is that uncertainty that contributes to not taking any action. However, if you have done some scenario planning earlier on — a technique where you lay out and consider a range of possibilities from worst-case to best-case — then you may have anticipated the course your life is taking. At this point much of the decision-making over your life is either shared or entirely in someone else's hands.