Why You Should Have Bucket List Items In Your Financial Plan

As we get older, we tend to focus on our day-to-day ‘To Do’ list which often means our schedules can look pretty repetitive and consist of work, family, eat, sleep, repeat!

Having a bucket list can help break us out of this repetitive schedule and give us something to focus on.

The last few years have also been particularly challenging and I think more and more people are looking for ways to achieve a sense of fulfilment recognising that none of us know what the future holds.

What Is A Bucket List?

A bucket list was originally intended to be a list of things you wanted to do before ‘you kicked the bucket’. However, many people advocate having a bucket list for shorter periods of time, for example, things to do ‘this year’ or the ‘next five years’ or ‘before I’m 40’ or ‘before I’m 60’.

By having shorter time frames it minimises the risk of things being put off until later. For example, people might say that they will do something particularly adventurous once they have retired. The problem is that no-one knows how healthy they will be as they age so putting things off runs the risk that they become impossible to do. Also, by putting everything off until retirement, we may simply not have the time to do all the things on our bucket list.

What Are The Benefits of A Bucket List?

Having a bucket list can keep us in touch with the things we do for fun, excitement and stress-relief. This can make us feel energized and more relaxed and keep burn-out at bay.

A bucket list can help us remember what is truly important regarding our own sense of self-fulfillment.

Including A Bucket List Within Your Financial Plan

When we work with clients to help articulate their ideal lifestyle, we encourage them to create some bucket list items within their financial plan. We will ask them to put a timeframe next to the relevant item and to ascribe a monetary value. This way it becomes more real. Sometimes a bucket list item might have a relatively small cost but a relatively long time commitment, for example learning a language or musical instrument. For other bucket list items, the costs can be considerable, albeit the timescale might be a few weeks, for example, climbing Kilimanjaro or sailing across the Atlantic.

Why You Should Have Lots of Things on Your Bucket List

One of the benefits of having a bucket list is to make the memories that you can look back on in later life. If you consider later life to be age 80 and beyond, how many years do you have to create those memories? By having lots of things on your bucket list you have more opportunities to make the memories.

Sometimes, we put an item on our bucket list that doesn’t turn out as we had hoped. I had learning to scuba dive on my bucket list which I didn’t particularly enjoy. I also went to see an American Football game whilst in the US and couldn’t figure out what all the fuss was about! We build up something on our bucket list that in reality doesn’t live up to our expectations. By having lots of things on our bucket list we can chalk it up to experience and focus on our next thing.

What Things Should Be On Your Bucket List?

I don’t believe that everything on your bucket list should necessarily be a huge, expensive, once in a lifetime experience although there should be at least some of these! Bucket list items can be about discovering new things, exploring new places, learning new things and spending time with friends and family. Some people also want to challenge themselves both mentally and physically.

Some of the things that have appeared on the bucket lists of clients I have worked with include:

Taking a university course, for example, art history.
Learning a new skill such as upcycling, carpentry or jewelry design.
Learning to paint.
Running the New York marathon.
Learning a new language.
Restoring a classic car.
Visiting a new restaurant once a month.
Learning a musical instrument.
Attending a music festival.
Taking surfing lessons.
Seeing a favourite band in a foreign city.
Hiring a car and exploring Italy.
Taking cookery classes.
Spending a month in Paris.
Buying an inter-rail pass and spending a month travelling.
Spending six weeks travelling across Europe in a camper van.
Hiking all the Wainwrights.
Hiring a villa for six weeks and having the family come out to visit us.
Watching the Monaco Grand Prix.
Buying a season ticket for my favorite football team.
Spending Christmas in the Caribbean.

I’m sure you can think of many more to put on your bucket list.

A bucket list is something that you can put together at any age and it can be a list that is constantly added to. I know some people who try and tick off a few things from their bucket list every year and who add several more things to their bucket list at the end of the year!

Having bucket list items within your financial plan can make them more visible and achievable. We love speaking with clients when we review their financial plans to see how many bucket list items they have managed to tick off.

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