Most people look forward to retirement—after all, most of us save money during our working lives to fund our golden years when we'll have more time to do what we enjoy. However, it's hard to do detailed planning if you haven't pinpointed, at least approximately, what you want to achieve in retirement. In other words, the first step for retirement planning is to imagine what you want your retirement to look like. Without a vision or goal, you can't make an effective plan. Once you take this first step of visualization, you can start to take more concrete steps to make it happen.

On this episode of Financial Decoder, host Mark Riepe speaks with Patrick Means, vice president and branch manager at Schwab. They discuss a series of concrete steps that are included on what we call the pre-retirement checklist. In other words, what do you need to take care of in the handful of years, months, and days before you retire?

To hear more about the power of checklists, listen to the Choiceology episode "A Successful Failure."

To read the study Mark references about active and passive risk taking, Check out "Differentiating Passive from Active Risk Taking: The Role of Self-Control and Time Perspective" from the Journal of Behavioral Decision Making. 

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Financial Decoder is an original podcast from Charles Schwab. For more on the series, visit Schwab.com/FinancialDecoder. 

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