Retirement: The best of your life
By Eric Plasker, DC

If you knew you'd live to be 100, how would you change your life? Would you retire? And if so, when? How would you plan for the next 50 years?

The fact is centenarians are one of the fastest-growing segments of the population in the United States, and the chance of you and your patients becoming one is growing by leaps and bounds.

Anyone who is 40 years old today could live to be 100 years old. During the past 40 years, the number of centenarians increased nearly tenfold and there are now 450,000 centenarians living in the world.

Our increased longevity is reshaping what traditional retirement means in this country. Retirement, as we currently know it, is becoming an outdated concept — a concept created for a world where the average life expectancy was 60 to 65 years.

The plan used to be to work for a company for 30 to 40 years, retire, and then go away, retreat, or withdraw from society living off a pension until you died just a few years later. But with life expectancy growing, your retirement plan should also be growing.

With all the opportunities that exist, why live off your portfolio as early as your mid-60s? What's great about embracing your longevity is that even if you wait until your 40s or 50s to start, you still have time to turn your financial life around and secure your future.

You have more resources available to you to make financing your 100-year lifestyle more exciting and abundant than you ever dreamed. The following is a seven-step action plan.

1. Get excited about the financial opportunity of your 100-year lifestyle. Take notice of the resources and experiences you have accumulated and how you can capitalize on them to create capital for your future.

2. Start saving now. Stop wasting money now. If you have not yet implemented these basics, don't procrastinate another second.

3. Fill in your 100-year balance sheet based on how it looks today. Decide how you want it to look in 10 years and list the five immediate action steps that you will need to take to reach your goals.

4. Meet with your financial advisor, accountant, estate planner, and insurance agent. Review your financial plan and income opportunities, and make the appropriate changes to help you secure and finance your 100-year lifestyle.

5. Prioritize your own self care and healthcare and invest in them. Having the money isn't nearly so much fun if you don't have the health to enjoy it. You are a chiropractor. Make sure you live the chiropractic way of life!

6. Check your credit score and credit report. Take appropriate action steps to clean up any errors.

7. Be a giver. Think about the purpose you would like to give your money so that a portion of your finances makes a difference in the world. Take an action step and make your next contribution today.

SHOULD YOU RETIRE?

One thing to determine is whether or not you will retire. You may wonder about this point, but it is a legitimate concern since not retiring is certainly a valid choice today.

The fact of the matter is that baby boomers have the knowledge, the savvy, the experience, and the education to keep working — and many are.

Whether they are staying in their traditional careers or taking retirement as an opportunity to have a second career to do something they've always dreamed of, such as a banker launching a catering business or a software designer becoming a piano teacher, the rise of the more mature entrepreneur in the United States is one of the top nine trends influencing the small business market, according to TrendTracker.

Chiropractic is a physically demanding occupation. If you choose to give up one-on-one care of patients, you can still contribute to society and fulfill your own aspirations. The key, though, is to identify what you want to do at that stage of your life now. And then prepare for it.

One of the world's most famous centenarians, George Burns, once joked that had he known he was going to live to be 100 years old, he would have taken better care of himself. Prepare now to make the rest of your life the best of your life.

Eric Plasker, DC, is founder of The Family Practice — a chiropractic coaching and training organization and author of The 100-Year Lifestyle: Dr. Eric Plasker's Breakthrough Solution for Living Your Best Life — Every Day of Your Life (www.100yearlifestyle.com). He can be reached at 866-LEAD-DCS or through his Web site at www.thefamilypractice.net.