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BLOG: Planning your 10-year countdown to retirement, part 2
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In the last blog entry, I kicked off the concept of making a 10-year plan as a run-up to retirement by first of all forcing yourself to sit down and have the discipline to write down everything you still have left to accomplish in this lifetime. In part 2, we continue with a year-by-year countdown to retirement.
Year 1
Discuss the life goals and retirement timeline you’ve written down with your spouse and family. Discuss your goals with your business partners and senior staff. When I suggest this, some clients blanch, thinking this will result in staff resignations: “What will happen as they know I’m approaching retirement?” Early disclosure will not lead to staff defections and, indeed, will give the most important support people in your professional life the confidence that you are thinking way, way ahead. Also, if you’ve not been doing so every couple of years already, start meeting formally with your personal financial planner or accountant to verify that your retirement date is scheduled with a sufficient margin for error — later than the date when you will most assuredly be financially independent.
Year 2
Fine-tune and continue enjoying the practice you have right now. To the extent financially feasible, dismiss unpleasant patients and payers from your world or, at the very least, send them down the hall to your junior associates. Remove the most galling and underperforming staff members. Arrange your schedule to fit your natural tempo (as well as practice economic realities), even if it means you have to dismiss the least economically viable patients to leave room for the ones you find more financially, socially or intellectually satisfying.
Year 3
Physical fitness and personal health issues loom. Good dietary and exercise habits maintained from this point forward will determine your vitality not only in retirement, but in the last years of your career. You may be a better clinician and surgeon than ever, but face facts: If you’re not exercising regularly, eating right and getting enough sleep, by the time you’re in your mid-50s, you’re starting to run out of gas for every afternoon clinic. If you have not planned well for retirement and find that you must now work involuntarily well into your 60s or 70s, you had better adopt a healthy lifestyle so you can keep churning as long as necessary.
With the next installment of this blog, we’ll cover years 4 through 7.
John B. Pinto is president of J. Pinto & Associates Inc., an ophthalmic practice management consulting firm established in 1979. John is the country’s most-published author on ophthalmology management topics. He is the author of John Pinto’s Little Green Book of Ophthalmology, Turnaround: 21 Weeks to Ophthalmic Practice Survival and Permanent Improvement, Cashflow: The Practical Art of Earning More From Your Ophthalmology Practice, The Efficient Ophthalmologist, The Women of Ophthalmology, Legal Issues in Ophthalmology and a new book, Ophthalmic Leadership: A Practical Guide for Physicians, Administrators and Teams. He can be reached at email: pintoinc@aol.com; website: www.pintoinc.com.