If you ask a representative sample of baby boomers that are approaching their retirement years what they are looking forward to the most about retirement, the most common answer that comes back is, “travelling country”.

There is something about the romance and fun of travelling country that appeals to you as you think about stepping out of the work world and doing things you have been hoping to do for all your lives.

And travelling country has that sense of adventure that calls to you when you look forward to a time when your responsibilities are few but you have the resources to realize your dreams.

If travelling country is a major objective of your retirement planning, the earlier in life you get started planning your travelling country adventures, the more fun your trips will be.

They say that anticipation is half the fun of a trip. So why not start now planning for your various destinations and the adventures you want to have when you get there?

If the baby boomer got a chance for travelling country during those child rearing years, you no doubt already have some solid travelling country disciplines in place to use for routine trips.

We can only hope that the baby boomer generation will be the last one who grew up in a culture where smoking was cool and acceptable.

The health passion of baby boomers that comes out of their dislike of anything that accelerates the aging process is one of the reasons the anti smoking movement has gained strength in the last decade.

The reasons for quitting smoke are well known to anyone who has paid attention to the issue at all.

Reasons to quit smoking

• Smoking reduces the life span. For the baby boomer generation, living a long and healthy life is a way of staying young. Smoking not only shortens the life span but it is a plague to your health in every era of life.
• Smoking destroys quality of life. Simple pleasures like breathing and enjoying a fine meal are damaged because smoking dominates the lungs and taste buds. The pleasures that make life worthwhile are rendered neutral by smoking.
• Smoking hurts the innocent. Secondary smoke hurts the ones you love and it plants in children the desire to smoke in their adult lives.

As baby boomers are rapidly approach what used to be defined as “retirement age”, a big concern often comes up about whether there will be enough retirement savings in place to be able to live a comfortable life later in life.

There have been plenty of rumbles from Washington that the Social Security system will not be able to bear up under the huge demand the boomer generation will put on retirement savings.

Few baby boomers are looking to depend on the money being there, even though you are all paying into it every month.

On top of that worry, the method your parents used of working for the same company for 50 years and retiring with a hefty retirement savings package and a gold watch has gone the way of the dinosaurs.

Long ago corporate America began to eliminate retirement savings packages as a straight forward benefit. So many baby boomers find themselves approaching retirement age with insufficient retirement savings to support them.

What is needed is a solid plan to attack retirement savings problem while boomers still have a good 10 to 15 years of working potential in them.

It seems almost absurd for baby boomers to think about retirement as the next stop in their long and eventful lives. But the absurd has become a reality.

As the baby boomer generation moves into their mid fifties and sixties, that specter of retirement looms ever closer.

So it’s natural and appropriate to sit back and review exactly what that means to each of you.

For many, the traditional attitude toward retirement has been one of joy. The concept of laying down your worries and bringing your work life to a comfortable end is something to look forward to.

The image of a life of sleeping late, golfing as much as you wish, taking up two or three hobbies and living a life of leisure is an idyllic vision in your minds for sure.

But the reality of retirement can also be a source of anxiety and fear. If the baby boomer who approaches that threshold is not financially prepared or the affairs and concerns of their work lives are not ready to be set aside, the idea of having go retire simply due to age seems to be a harsh and an unpleasant prospect.

There is a certain romance to online trading on the stock market. Wall Street and all the drama of what goes on there seems exciting and a place where millionaires are made in a day.

Fortunately, for most of you, Wall Street is a far away place and you would be too intimidated to actually try for online trading in that complex environment.

If you get a chance to visit and watch the frantic online trading floor in action, that’s plenty.

Baby boomers are notoriously self confident and have a generational attitude of, “If someone can do it, so can you.” When this attitude is brought to investing, that can set up a dangerous situation for the baby boomer from a financial perspective.

The explosion of the internet which has put virtually every kind of transaction at your fingertips has spawned this new phenomenon of “Online Trading.”

In theory, any baby boomer could sit down with their retirement money and with flew clicks on their favorite stock investment web site, make a fortune over night.

Well, at least that is the allure of online trading. There are some very good things about the movement that has been afoot in the last few years to put your financial world at your fingertips on the internet.

Baby boomers owe a lot to mentoring their own youth that instilled the values that brought them into the world.

You might not think back on the wild days of the 50s and 60s as a time when mentored youth were expressing the values of their elders.

But there is really no way that such a powerful explosion of culture change could happen without the influence of teachers and mentoring the youth of the time.

Mentoring the youth culture developed their values in the 40s and 50s. These were values that were outraged by the ravages of war and perceived injustice in society.

The outcome of the civil rights movement, the women’s rights advances and other society changing movements show that the teaching of a few principled individuals can literally change the world.

As baby boomers move toward late middle age, this is an outstanding time to consider mentoring a youth of the next generation to pass long some of the values that have held true for baby boomers over the decades.

This is the real treasure of one generation passing their wisdom on to the next when they are able to share with the young what values really do mean something and which ones will pass with time.

Meditation became part of the vernacular of lifestyle choices and a source of a lot of conversation as far back as the 60s for baby boomers when there was a big interest in eastern religions and things that were exotic and new.

But while many of the flash in the pan interests in exotic religions during that time frame faded away in the life style of baby boomers, meditation has endured and become a common practice and resource that has benefited this generation in every decade of their lives.

There is a good reason why meditation has endured and even grown in popularity far beyond any religious context.

Meditation has tremendous benefits for virtually every aspect of life and those who integrate it into their daily lifestyles can experience those benefits virtually as soon as they start.

You don’t have to be a guru at meditation to realize benefits from the very first time to give it a try.

Some of those benefits of meditation include…

• Meditation is calming. Because the act of meditation calls for you to bring your thoughts into captivity and to still your mind and focus it, that sense of your soul being in turmoil eases and you are able to address the cause of your anxiety and see a solution more clearly because your emotions are not clouding the issue.

Marriage is a funny thing. How you view it is drastically different if you are a teenager or youth with stars in your eyes compared to your vision when you have been ensconced in the practice for 20-30 years and looking toward a life in retirement as a married couple.

Baby boomers have experienced every aspect of marriage from that early idealistic stage through divorces, various redefinitions and now taking their marriages into their retirement years. It may be that this next transition of marriage will bring as many changes to that special relationship as any that have gone before.

How you view marriage as you move toward your retirement years without a doubt depends on how marriage has gone for you over the decades. If marriages are rocked with difficulty, separations and other woes, retirement can bring a new dimension to that tension.

On the other hand, part of the commission of retirement is to begin to seek resolution of life’s struggles so working together with each other in the context of marriage can bring tremendous healing in this phase of life.

How is marriage important

Each era of life seems to bring a new opportunity to define marriage and how it will be an important part of life.

A lot of baby boomers would like to forget that one of the watershed movements that defined the personality of this generation was the time frame dominated by, for lack of a better word, hippies.

Hippies seems somewhat quaint and antiquated now had a tremendous power in the mid to late sixties when it carried with it the impact of tremendous social change as well as a massive shift in public morality and consciousness.

So while this is often a time of a bit of embarrassment for the baby boomer generation, it is also a formative part of their history and it deserves respect for that reason.

To be fair, not all baby boomers were hippies. As is often the case, the hippies movement was something that got tremendous media coverage but it represented only a small portion of the baby boomer population at the time.

By percentage, very few of that age group actually joined the “tune in, drop out, turn on” society of the hippies.

What are hippies?

But because hippies were a colorful, eccentric, flamboyant and sinful crowd, they titillated the public interest any time there was a public spectacle brought on by hippies gathering.

Baby boomers seem gifted with perpetual youth. But they are also people of passion.

From the moment this generation arrived on this earth, they seemed to be bringing a mission and a different vision for society than had existed before.

This sense of knowledge and of vision accounts for the incredible drive baby boomers have shown throughout their adult lives which have resulted in changes to society so profound that life in America today only faintly resembles how we lived in the 50s and 60s.

Each era of life has brought its own challenges to baby boomers. As parents, baby boomers were committed to having a different kind of relationship with their children.

They are more hands on, participatory and interactive with children in a much greater way than generations before.

In a very real way, baby boomers parents sought to be both parent and best friends to their children.

The outcome has not always been positive but you do see a sense of family unity and emulation of parents in children of boomers that are even more committed than the family model of the past because baby boomers viewed parenting as a mission and job one of their lives.