The Wheel of Life is the perfect tool for planning your retirement. Answer the questions, ‘How is my life now?’ and ‘How do I want to be?’ and you are on your way.
The Wheel is a great tool for both evaluating your current level of satisfaction with life and for visioning how you wish your life to be. Perfect when contemplating retirement or re-evaluating it! And of course as we enter the last quarter of the year, it is a great planning tool for next year.
How to use the Wheel of Life
The Wheel is a circle divided into 8 segments, as per the chart below:
Each segment represents an area of life, as follows:
Physical
The physical segment refers to your physical health but also to your location and type of home, that is, your physical surroundings.
Financial
Your financial situation and how you manage your finances.
Relationships
Not just intimate and family relationships, but all your relationships including friends and colleagues.
Daily management
Even in retirement a little time management goes a long way, in fact it might be even more important to ensure you feel a sense of satisfaction at the end of each day. Oh, and your daily management list might include making time to finish that fabulous novel!
Work
You may or may not still participate in paid work during retirement but this segment is always valid; for example do you volunteer, do you have investments to manage etc.? You may have a project, some research, perhaps the family tree.
Recreation
This might also be described as play. How do you spend your leisure time, do you have hobbies, creative pursuits, do you allow yourself to just stop, or to be spontaneous?
Spiritual
Your spiritual practice; this may be based on religion, a non-religious spiritual philosophy, meditation. It may be something like music or art that takes you into another space.
Mental
Your mental health, in every sense; do you deliberately engage in activities to keep your brain productively active, do you feel yourself to be in good mental health?
Using the Wheel of Life for planning your retirement
So, what’s this all got to do with planning and enjoying your retirement? You simply can’t get to where you want to be without knowing where you are currently. This is a tool for assessing your current level of satisfaction with life.
This is not a process to be obsessive about, but rather a step towards actually documenting your life map, every so often, when you feel a little reflection may be productive. It is one process to open the way to further thinking, not an end in itself. Could life could be better or are you satisfied with where your life is heading?
How about starting now to assess your current level of satisfaction in life, it’s easy and it won’t take long.
1. Get a piece of paper and draw the wheel of life (it doesn’t have to be perfect, just a circle with 8 roughly equal segments).
2. Label each segment as above.
3. Give yourself a score out of 10 for each segment – closest to the centre being low and the outside being high (remember: these are your personal feelings about life, not your idea of what others think your life should be like). Be honest with yourself, how do you really feel about your financial situation, your relationships. Mark the score within the segment.
4. Join up the dots (see below).
5. Review your wheel, see where there are imbalances and decide what you would like to change.
So, in my example above, I might be very happy with my scores for Work and for Relationships but not happy with my score for Financial. It might be that I have financial difficulties or just that I know I am not spending enough time looking at or understanding my finances (maybe I don’t know what my financial status really is). Similarly, my Physical sector isn’t looking too flash.
From here I can develop plans to improve one or more of the segments. It might not be the segment with the lowest score; I might decide to focus on the Spiritual segment. Perhaps working there, or on my physical health, will give me more clarity and energy so I can more easily deal with the Financial segment.
A positive change means a re-balancing rather than striving for a perfect 10 in every segment. The key is to take action but not overwhelm yourself with too much to do. Note too, that a positive change does not necessarily mean more effort in every segment. It may be that in the wheel above the emphasis on Work is taking up too much time at the expense of the other segments. Perhaps it is time to take the foot off that particular pedal.
If Financial is a focus for you, you might like to read our post on getting started with Financial Planning.
Have you used a tool like this for evaluation and planning ? Have you found it useful? Do you think there are missing segments? How would you use this tool for planning or fine tuning your retirement?
Vanessa @ Bloggers and Bacon | 26th March 2017 at 12:33 pm
I like the idea of this as an overview, though at first I thought “woah that’s a lot of elements to think about”.
Jan at Retiring Not Shy! | 27th March 2017 at 8:00 am
It’s a great tool and one that can be used at a high level or more intensively as you feel the need. Thanks for stopping by x
sydneyshopgirl | 10th January 2017 at 2:57 pm
That’s a great way of getting an overview of life. Also to highlight anything that needs changing.
SSG xxx
Retiring Not Shy! | 10th January 2017 at 3:05 pm
It is indeed a great tool for both those things. Did you give it a go?
Denyse Whelan | 10th January 2017 at 11:28 am
It is a great tool and I think all of us can benefit from its use! Thank you for linking up for #lifethisweek 2/52 Denyse
Retiring Not Shy! | 10th January 2017 at 3:05 pm
Thanks Denyse for the link up. I agree the wheel of life is a tool everyone can benefit from.
Maria Parenti-Baldey | 09th January 2017 at 5:06 pm
That is such a great idea. Thank you. Will be doing that asap. It’s incredible what we take for granted.
Retiring Not Shy! | 09th January 2017 at 6:03 pm
It’s a great tool for both review and planning. I have used it on many occasions with great results.
jotracey | 09th January 2017 at 4:55 pm
What a cool tool. I might just give this a go.
Anne Freier | 20th June 2016 at 7:33 pm
What a great tool. My husband and I did this together but with separate sheets. My husband is a pretty visual/linear person so it was great for him. Lots of in depth conversation ensued as we explored the “dips”. We knew we were “stuck” but it helped us articulate it all. On the areas we needed to bolster we also wrote down one thing we could do straight away to make improvement. It was apparent how much we both missed being valued in a work situation and the capacity to help others. We are now looking into various volunteering options.
Choosing your retirement location may be harder than you think | 19th April 2016 at 9:51 pm
[…] To begin the process of choosing your location you might like to answer some of these questions and also to refer to the Wheel of Life. […]
Technology & Disintermediation: Love, hate, tolerate, exploit | 21st December 2015 at 5:21 am
[…] But, but, but the power of the technology cannot be denied and we use it daily, wherever we are in the world. We do our banking online, we check our investments online, we buy and sell shares online. We research restaurants and accommodation and book travel online, we shop online. We run electronic calendars. More importantly, we remain connected with our physically distant friends and family online; we email, we Skype, we Facebook, we Instagram, we Pinterest. We also use Twitter as one way to keep up with the news. And at the height of an Australian summer, we use technology to keep track of bush fires near our home. It would be fair to say that we live in an online world and we mostly enjoy it. It is an important part of the daily management aspect of our Wheel of Life Balance. […]
Jonathan Key | 03rd December 2015 at 5:18 am
I have never done this exercise before so this is new to me. What a great way to organize your thoughts and plan for the future. I’m sharing this with my wife for us to do together.
Jan from RetiringNotShy | 03rd December 2015 at 5:38 am
Thanks for the response Jonathan, it is a deceptively simple but powerful tool and one that is great to use alone or with a partner. Terrific new year project too and one I really must revisit myself as part of my January planning for 2016. So pleased you found it so helpful, I plan to write some future posts which expand on each of the wheel sectors, looking at them from a retirement planning point of view.
LillithBlackWriting | 30th November 2015 at 2:03 am
I’ve done an exercise like this before, but that was a while ago. Thank you for a great reminder and the instructions – I’ll be doing it tonight! 🙂
Jan from RetiringNotShy | 30th November 2015 at 4:08 am
We all need a reminder now and then. I am so glad that it came at the right time for you. Enjoy!
Johanna | 16th November 2015 at 1:50 am
This is a great way to get our lives back in focus when we feel a little off kilter. I agree, it’s hard being honest with yourself, but when you write it down like this, things become much clearer 🙂
Jan from retiringnotshy | 16th November 2015 at 3:28 am
It isn’t always easy Johanna but one must!
It is a great tool and as you say seeing it on the page makes it much clearer than thrashing around inside the head and the emotions.
Dianne Childs | 02nd November 2015 at 6:24 am
I haven’t seen anything like this before, but it’s an interesting way to analyse the parts of your life and make improvements. 🙂
Di from Max The Unicorn
Jan from retiringnotshy | 02nd November 2015 at 9:48 am
It is Di, it’s very simple in a way but also very effective. Not always easy to be totally honest with oneself, so it does need some reflection.
sammie@theannoyedthyroid.com | 01st November 2015 at 8:15 pm
I agree with Mica, I think this is a great idea to use at any stage of life. What a neat tool! Thanks for sharing and for linking up with the Ultimate Rabbit Hole.
Jan from retiringnotshy | 01st November 2015 at 9:26 pm
It is a great tool to use any time you feel stuck or when you are planning some changes, any time really. Of course the trick is to then act and we don’t always find that easy. Again thank you Sammie x
Mica | 27th October 2015 at 8:46 pm
Great idea! I think it’s a nice tool to use at any stage of your life really! 🙂
Thanks for your comment on my last post about blogger struggles!
Away From The Blue Blog
Jan from retiringnotshy | 28th October 2015 at 1:24 am
You are right Mica, it is a great tool to use at any stage of life and on a semi-regular basis as our balance and focus shifts from time to time 😉