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Health & Fitness

Preparing for the Future: Contingency Planning or Staying Afloat When Things Don't Go As Expected

This blog focuses on contingency planning, or the need to anticipate what you might need to do when unexpected events happen with your job, your relationships or your health.

The blog is written by Bill Clarke, a semi-retired management consultant who authored a book entitled Retirement Renaissance. In doing research while writing the book, Bill identified a series of things that everyone needs to think about in preparing for the future. Each blog will feature an idea you can think about and possibly add to your list of things you want to do to ensure a better current and future lifestyle.  

Preparing for the Future: Contingency Planning or Staying Afloat When Things Don’t Go As Expected

In an earlier blog we covered the need to develop a life plan for what you want to do or what you want to become. Here is an excerpt:

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There are three areas of goals in life: personal, career and spiritual. Personal goals deal with what kind of a person you strive to become. A complete person should have goals established in all three areas. .

OK, so you’ve got a pretty good idea about where you are going. Then one fine day your world comes crashing down when you are caught in a corporate downsizing … or your spouse or partner decides to go in a different direction … or your doctor advises that you have been diagnosed with a rare tumor … or any of a hundred other things that happen to people, suddenly and unexpectedly. The question then becomes, “Now what?”

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That’s where contingency planning comes in. You can’t possibly plan for all contingencies but you should anticipate what you might need to do if something went haywire in three basic areas: your job or career, your primary relationships, and your health, physically and spiritually.

Job and Career — Whether you work for a company or have your own business, you will always be vulnerable to forces beyond your control that could take away what you have worked hard to achieve. That doesn’t mean that you should be dropping off your resume all over town. It does mean that you need to sit down and quietly think through what you might do if you lose your primary source of income. The knee jerk reaction would be to “Get another job!” Not so fast. What you need to anticipate in advance is a process to determine what you are really good at; namely, your core competencies.

Many of us don’t necessarily plan our careers, it just happens. We go to work for somebody and advance through a series of jobs until we begin to learn what we are really good at. Many a person has started in accounting or systems or human resources and ended up in another part of the business that better suits their skills and interests.

Your contingency plan for this part of your life needs to reflect what you might want to do if an unforeseen event interrupts your current career status. You should start by identifying you core competencies and then reshaping your resume and search in areas in which you can use what you are good at. In fact, if you are stuck in a dead-end situation that is not utilizing your core capabilities, you might want to consider making the switch sooner than later.

Primary Relationships — Your primary relationships are with your spouse or partner, your family and your closest friends. All of these primary relationships are subject to change without notice. Your family will always be a part of you regardless of the loss of some of the key members. Life will go on. Anticipate what you might need to do without a mother or father or grandparents or a really close relative.

The relationship with your spouse or partner is an area to ask the question, “What if something happened to ... ?” What would you do? This certainly raises the need for writing a will, but more importantly, the need for partners to talk openly about their feelings should something happen to one of them.

When it comes to close friends, all you can do is nurture the relationship and hope for the best. The best part of friendship is that it is something that is dynamic and continues to change throughout one’s life as old relationships fade and new relationships are born.

Your Health — Few of us will go through life without some significant medical event changing our situation, briefly or long term. The best defense is an offense that strives every day to take care of our bodies. If you are doing all you can to stay healthy, then you simply need to plan for any contingencies by having good doctors and good health care insurance. If you get seriously sick and need daily care, what would you do? How would you react? We don’t like to talk about the inevitable, namely the fact that all of us will die someday, but you need to plan for what would happen when you are no longer here. It does happen, anticipate what you might need to do in advance.  

The same is true for your spiritual health. Whether you have a strong spiritual life or none at all, you will find that the older you get, the more you tend to think about the importance of spiritual growth in your life. It probably has to do with our feelings about what is on the other side of the veil of life. If you believe, like most people, that there probably is a hereafter, then you will probably begin to think about preparing for it. Therefore, your spiritual health becomes important. Your contingency plan is simply to position yourself for whatever might happen after you pass through to the other side.

A contingency plan for these key areas of life simply suggests that you anticipate what you might need to do if an unexpected event interrupted your current lifestyle. If you don’t do it, nobody else will.

The next blog will focus on how to think through big decisions.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

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