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BLOG: Planning your 10-year countdown to retirement, part 1
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In the last blog series, I provided you with post-retirement thoughts from a former client. It got me to thinking about what the ideal countdown would be for a surgeon departing active practice. What timeline to leaving active practice should thoughtful ophthalmologists observe?
So I’ve created a list of activities and placed each item into a year-by-year staging. Obviously, every situation is different, and you should not use this list as a substitute for personalized input from your attorneys, accountants, consultants, partners, buddies, sympathetic colleagues, mental health counselors, senior managers, clergy and whomever else you turn to for blunt advice on the nitty-gritties of life and work.
Let’s say you’re 50-ish — the typical age at which eye surgeons start thinking seriously about retirement in a decade or more. Force yourself to sit down, completely alone, for at least an hour in a quiet place. Make a list of everything you have and everything you want. Everything important you have experienced and everything you would like to experience.
What’s the bottom line with this? Even with the most auspicious genes, you probably have no more than 30 or 35 years of sentient, physically active life left on the planet. And the clock is ticking. The patients you see every 8 or 10 minutes, every working day, are living reminders that you have sauntered from birth through youth, jogged to maturity and may now be galloping onward to senescence and oblivion.
What would you really like to accomplish in those comparably few, fast years you have left? Write it all down. Formulate the first draft of a plan. Then, consider overlaying your bucket list on a 10-year countdown to retirement, which you’ll see in the next three installments of this blog series. This countdown list is obviously incomplete and doesn’t cover all the details. But it should be sufficient as a starting template for your more detailed planning. You should obviously feel free to move some hallmarks up and down the calendar and to omit others altogether.
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.