You must make a detailed plan to be financially secure upon retirement

Approximately 83% of Australians over the age of 60 are on some form of age pension, and this means only 17% have accumulated enough wealth over their lifetime to be self-funded. Whether you are building your nest egg via property, shares or through your business, planning is critical. There is an old saying “measure twice, cut once”. What this actually means in simple terms is that the more time you invest in planning, the fewer problems you’re likely to have with a higher likelihood of a successful outcome. 

Think of it this way: if you were going to build a house, you wouldn’t simply buy a block of land and ask the builder to start laying bricks. You would first engage an architect and sit down to put your vision onto paper to create the house you have dreamed of.  The same applies to your investing and business, so you must start with the end result in mind. 

It is simply impossible to work towards a profitable future if you don’t know where you’re going, and the fact is, the more time you spend on planning, the less time you spend on doing. 

As we were going through the process of creating a property portfolio and building a business we decided that we needed to sit down and work out exactly what we wanted to achieve. After all, let’s face it, how can you possibly know what you want to build if you don’t have a vision and plans to build it? 

Firstly, we had to work out what we (individually) wanted out of the business and our investments. We sat down and wrote a list of the things that we each hoped to personally achieve with the business and our investment portfolio, and we were surprised to discover that our answers were very similar:

1. Generate a passive income stream well into our retirement
2. Restore balance in our lives
3. Choice – the ability to choose whether we work or not, without our income stopping when we stop working
4. To help others through our succes 

Do you have a roadmap for the future of your business or investments? In his book The 7 Habits Of Highly Effective People, Dr Stephen R Covey says that “you don’t plan to fail, you simply fail to plan”. Planning helps us to focus on the ’important, but not urgent’ things that we need to attend to. It helps to anticipate and prepare for change. Think of your plan as if it’s your blueprint for change in every aspect of your business and investing life. One of our goals was to create a business that we, as the owners, did not have to work in for 100+ hours each week, as we were doing at the time. So we started delegating work to the team. This gave us more time to work on our business.

Next, we identified the key things that we needed to do in order to achieve our goals and this became our business plan, which we like to call our ‘action plan’.

This document helped us to stay focused on the critical stages of transformation in our business, and ensured that our key activities were identified and implemented in a logical and practical way.

Your business and financial plan will help you do three things:

1. It will clarify your vision and goals regarding what you want your business and investment portfolio to look like in the future.
2. It will identify where your business and investment portfolio is currently placed.
3. It will determine what work you need to do to close the gap.

It is point number three – knowing what work you need to do to close the gap – that forms the basis of your action plan.

It’s important to remember that you may come up with hundreds of ideas and strategies regarding things that need to be done, but they can’t all be implemented at the same time. In fact, this is one of the reasons why many businesses and investors fail to transform themselves, because there are just too many changes and decisions to make and people become overwhelmed and do nothing – or they try to do everything at once.

David Naylor is acting CEO of Chan & Naylor

This information has been prepared as a general guideline, and is not intended to be an exhaustive or a complete analysis of the topics in question or issues raised in this article.