Retirement is a hugely relieving life event, even if it is a relatively distant milestone for the most of us. Retirement has a way of sneaking up on you though, and you might find yourself closer to those promised days of freedom and leisure than you thought. While retirement can be a scary thing to plan for, particularly from a financial perspective, it is also a milestone with huge amounts of promise.
For one, retirement allows you to consider making the trips you were never able to make during your career – bucket-list trips, taking in destinations and views you had only dreamed of seeing up until now. Planning these post-retirement trips is at once thrilling and laborious, so what can you do to make your holiday planning that bit easier?
Planning
Let’s start with the planning phase proper. This is arguably the most fun part of preparing for a holiday, as nothing is truly off-limits. You can create theoretical itineraries for any number of different destinations, in service of nailing down exactly what kind of holiday you’d like to experience. Are you angling for adventure, or do you simply want to sunbathe and sup some supreme cocktails?
Funding
With your ideal type of holiday nailed down, the less-fun parts become more immediately necessary – including securing funding. As a retiree, you’ll only have so much money you can confidently put towards your holiday, and you many need to look elsewhere to drum up some funds.
If you have a house, you may be able to use some of its value for you travel fund. This is obtained via an equity release scheme, which gives you access to part of your home’s value and recoups this value from the eventual sale of the same home.
Destinations
With the funds secured to buy your travel and accommodation, you can (at long last!) select your destination proper. If you’ve secured enough value from your home, you may even be able to plan a multi-stop tour, such as across continental Europe.
Insurance
As a final point, and boring as it may be to countenance, it is particularly important that you put some time aside to consider travel insurance coverage before you travel. This is particularly important to consider in later life, where the risk of accident, injury or some unforeseen intervening event is much higher. Without insurance, something as innocuous as a slip in the bath could be the difference between a week in the sun and the complete loss of your holiday investments to date.
In the grand scheme of things, insurance is a paltry cost. Besides, what you’re really paying for is peace of mind; with insurance, you get the knowledge that everything you’ve placed into your bucket-list post-retirement travel is protected, and that you’ll be guaranteed your holiday one way or another.
