Extending Your Bucket List

Life’s race is almost over. It’s time to take your victory lap and start preparing for whatever comes next. Completing the following four tasks can help you meet any last obligations to your loved ones, ensure your final days are spent as you want, and reconcile your dreams with the realities of your life.

Planning, whether planning for your estate, for your old age, or for your loved ones, is in many ways a technical activity. Even more than that, however, serious planning is truly a mindset. To be sure, there are some very real decisions to be made against a very real timeline. But for every “how” and “what,” there is a “why.”

So, why do you need to plan? This may be a perfect time to step back and get a little perspective.

Perspective on life and planning is always an introspective activity. For example, when it comes to estate planning, consider a recent article in Forbes titled “Closing the Books – 4 Final Tasks Before Death.”

Here they are:

1. Estate Planning
2. Life and Health
3. Bury the Hatchet
4. Bucket List

These four final tasks are not so much a morose to-do list, but a guide to help process your priorities.

The original article provides details relevant to each task, but the perspective to be gained comes from thinking of each task as part of one plan. The details are to be figured out or even discovered, but the perspective is what drives them.

So, what drives you in life and old age, and how are you to accomplish your goals?

Reference: Forbes (January 14, 2014) “Closing the Books – 4 Final Tasks Before Death”