You’ve probably heard that the first Baby Boomers are reaching the traditional retirement age of 65 starting this coming New Years Day, January 1, 2011. Incredibly, every day for the next 19 years, 10,000 members of the Woodstock Generation will turn 65, yes–10,000 Boomers turning 65 every day, for the next 19 years!  That’s about 7 Boomers every second!

So what steps can Boomers be taking to make 2011 a great year for them?  Here are 10 areas every Boomer can be looking at right now, to have the high quality of life they want in their next stage of life.  Here are my Top 10 New Years Resolutions for Boomers in 2011 (and for everyone else who wants to be able to retire some day, too):

I resolve that I will:

1.  Take Control to Have Enough Money to Retire Some Day—Put away enough money in 2011 to get your 401(k) match, if your employer offers it—that’s free money that can immediately double your retirement investment (just make sure you don’t keep it all in one company’s stock).

2.  Re-Balance, Diversify, and Keep the Costs of My Investments Low—Take a new look at all the investment choices offered in your 401(k) plan.  Make sure to re-balance your investment allocations and expand into investments that will preserve asset value in the next few years, including some that can benefit from emerging economies growing faster than our own.

3. Investigate the Best Ways to Have Continuing Income After I Retire From My Primary Career—Cultivate passions and talents that can provide you ongoing income (such as subject matter expertise, information marketing, consulting, collecting).  Forget about the old idea of “retiring from.”  Think of what it is you will “retire to.”

4. Get Moving Every Day in 2011 and Improve My Health—The biggest single health threat for most Boomers is from diseases of their heart and circulatory system.  The best antidote: Get moving every day, for 30 minutes a day, in the exercise of your choice (and with the approval of your doctor).  Too many people think of their health in terms of treatment, rather than prevention of disease, and that’s a calamity.

5. Take Better Steps to Help in Caring for My Aging Parents, And Provide for Preserving My Own Sanity—Anticipate the predictable stages of change in the capacities of your parents, and start a conversation with them now to clarify their wishes regarding actions to be taken or not taken at the end of life.  Put in motion the documents, which will provide legally for their wishes to be carried out.  Don’t keep putting it off, and don’t assume everything will stay the same

6.  Have a Will (and also a Living Will) Made Up This Year by An Attorney, Based on My Outline—Even if you don’t care a whit what happens to your money or property after you die, you owe it to your relatives to have a will (and a Living Will, so that in any event, you won’t burden your children, spouse or caretaker with making the key decisions without your input). Without a will, family squabbles and bickering will inevitably arise (and momentarily tarnish your memory).

7. Build My Dreams Together With My Spouse and Significant Others—Start sharing your future retirement dreams together now…it’s stimulating, fun and productive.  The key to planning for your enjoyable next stage of life is to build-in all the possibilities. You should organize activities that you can do individually as well as activities that you can pursue as a couple.

8.  Learn My A, B, C’s: Research and Decide the Best Place(s) for Me to Live in the Future, and When—Many aspects of retirement planning get involved with considerations of money.  However, here is where you get to consider the potentially huge variations in your annual cost-of-living – the expense side of wherever you choose to live.

9.  Enjoy a Travel Adventure While Visiting My A,B,C’s—Where to live for the rest of your life? That’s a question many baby boomers are asking themselves and each other these days. It’s difficult to know what life is like in a different part of the country, or the world, without spending some quality time there, in a few choice locations, at different times of the year.  2011 is your year to start planning for this critically important decision by investing in one or more strategic travel adventures, to investigate the potential best new location for your next stage of life.

10. Tap Into the Wisdom of the Ages to Strengthen My Spirit and Wellbeing—To deepen your faith beyond today’s concerns, tap into the Wisdom of the ages and strengthen your inner resources.  Whether through a church, temple, yoga, volunteering, other spiritual practices, reading of the sacred texts, or all of the above, restore your faith in the eternal intelligence of the universe.  Much has been written on the topic of finding happiness after retirement because it is so fundamental and yet so challenging for many retirees. One good place to start is with a little self-examination, along with obtaining inspiration from wise authors and trusted acquaintances whose ideas and input you wouldn’t have easily discovered by yourself.

Richard Roll

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What an unusual day I had yesterday.  Starting at 7am, with three other members of our Baby Boomers Retirement Network team in tow, I headed to a large Hartford, CT venue to hear from an all-star cast of luminaries on the theme of Get Motivated!  We along with 19,000 others in the audience, heard Joe Montana, Laura Bush, Krish Dhanam, Phil Town, Zig Ziglar, Steve Forbes, Rudy Giuliani, and Colin Powell tell their personal stories, funny anecdotes, and reminiscences in the process of trying to make pertinent points.  I came away with a number of standout ideas, mostly not new but always worth being reminded of.

America is a country with many problems, flawed but still a great country, still with the greatest potential of any country on earth because of our system of free enterprise and constitutionally guaranteed freedoms [which need to be protected vigilantly and vigorously from every type of extremism].  There are no lines of people waiting to get into most, if not all, other countries of the world.  Our freedoms and protections here beat most anywhere else. Free enterprise is still the greatest engine for prosperity the world has seen.  Our level of educational success as a nation is way below par (Laura Bush), we have to make the future of our children and their children a higher priority.  We need to all make sure we have God and service to God in our mission.

Zig talked about Martin Luther King Jr., and the civil rights movement to expand dignity to all individuals, and having a sound “Home Court Advantage” (be good to your spouse) to have the most success and joy in life.  Forbes talked about how the Fed’s excess printing of money in 2003-4, when we should have been protecting the dollar, was the underlying cause of the financial crisis [partially true but not clearly the cause].  He’s still beating the same drum: simplify the tax code, enact a flat tax (I haven’t heard the other side of that argument however, if there is one).  Colin Powell and Giuliani, polished, professional, predictable. Two great patriots, in my opinion (although I’m not a huge Giuliani fan).  Krish Dhanam, an Indian émigré, motivational speaker and protégé of Zig Ziglar, who now lives in Texas, reeled off portions of speeches from Patrick Hale, Abraham Lincoln, and John F. Kennedy, Ghandi, and Mother Theresa to bring home his message of patriotism and self-management: take ownership of our lives, practice stewardship–give more than you have, leave more than you take, build great partnerships, realize whose applause matters.  Beware: mediocrity and misery both love company, keep out of that trap.

Others talked about how we have to wean ourselves off of junk media (TV, tabloid rags, news media), junk pop culture, and junk food, and focus on getting our family’s financial foundations and values straightened out and sound (a message I’ve been pounding away at in this blog and elsewhere, for years).  The government is helpless and hopeless in correcting the housing foreclosure problem at this point (see the my February, 3, 2009 blog post “Emergency Plan to Save the Economy” for my housing market recovery proposal which the key officials in Washington have all received).

Then, yesterday evening, I went to hear the rock group Living Colour perform live at our local Fairfield Theatre Company Stage One, an intimate 200 seat theatre whose Board I serve on.  Living Colour is a Grammy award winning and truly “out there” metal/funk/rock band who studied at the Berklee School of Music in Boston, toured as an opening act for the Rolling Stones, and are virtuoso musicians.  Yet incredibly, the themes of Living Colour were surprisingly related to those of the luminaries earlier in the day: how New Orleans was forsaken over race after Hurricane Katrina; what it took to overcome the KKK and the “colored not allowed” culture of the Old South; Malcolm X, Muhammad Ali, Statue of Liberty and American Flag is for all Americans, not just the few.  They quote JFK, FDR, and MLK in their song “Cult of Personality,” which the National Review listed at number 18 on its list of the 50 greatest conservative rock songs in 2006.  They shout, “You don’t have to follow me, only you can set you free,” echoing messages of the motivators in Hartford.  Their song “Middleman” exposes the folly of allowing the media to be the middleman between Americans and their experience of life.

And for me, the biggest takeaway of all from the day comes from the lyrics in one of Living Colour’s songs: “You’ve got to fight for your neighborhood.”  And neighborhood in this sense is metaphorical, it’s where you live, it’s where you come from, it’s the best of who you are.  You have to fight for it.  Fight the foreclosure blight, fight the educational slide, fight the narrow-minded mean-spirited (Giuliani: be an optimist, with pessimism there is no “there” that’s worth striving to get to.)

Fight the Taliban, fight the terrorists, fight the bullies and the obstructionists who oppose creating a more just and humane society, and a fiscally sound one.  And note once and for all: It will never be perfect.

Fight to learn about how to get better returns on your investment capital and 401(k) or IRA account without taking more risk (it can be done and I’ll be showing you more specifics in the coming months).  Keep your spirit strong, your body healthy, work to get out of costly debt and get out now from unproductive financial services relationships.

Fight for America’s highest ideals, for most, it’s still the best chance in the world.  And for Boomers: take action, take the right action, take it now and keep taking it.

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