10 Creative Women's Vision of Their Retirement Era

🟣 And rebranding 'retirement planning'

Retirement planning needs a serious rebrand.

For most of us, "retirement planning" brings up thoughts of endless paperwork, confusing jargon, ultimate boredom and the overwhelming fear of not having enough—leading to feelings of anxiety, avoidance, and that nagging sense of guilt for not doing more sooner.

No wonder so many of us avoid it altogether.

But here's the thing: retirement planning isn't just about crunching numbers. What we don’t talk about enough is the sense of relief and confidence that comes once you start planning.

Planning financially for your Future Self brings clarity, peace of mind, and a sense of control over your future. It deepens your connection with your old self. It can even bring you closer to your partner!

Retirement planning is wellness.

It’s also bold and seksy because when you plan for retirement, you're tackling three of the biggest taboos: aging, money, and death.

That’s power.

Retirement planning is the ultimate self-care move with the longest-lasting benefits.

Your Future Self—the independent, secure person who chooses to spend their time the way they want—will thank you.

And this is especially critical for women.

We live longer, earn less, and often prioritize caring for others over our own financial future. We spend less time in the workforce and typically own fewer assets than men.

That’s why, as women, we’re more likely to experience poverty in retirement.

But here’s the good news: taking the time to envision and plan your future can dramatically change that outcome. Because the more you consider your future, the less you treat your Future Self as a stranger. Research proves it.

So, how do we get more women to spend time envisioning, connecting and caring for their future selves?

Today, I propose we do it with a burst of creativity!

I’ve teamed up with ten inspiring women who agreed to share their perspectives on retirement and their visions for their future selves.

I’m incredibly grateful to each of them for giving their precious time (because time is the ultimate luxury!) and for their enthusiasm in helping other women plan their financial futures.

🎆 I hope you enjoy these vision board fireworks as much as I do!

Ali is 34, lives in LA, and runs the design studio Ali LaBelle Creative. She also manages the Instagram account @alilabelle and writes the newsletter À La Carte:

I've done versions of this exercise with business coaches and therapists, and it's always interesting to see what consistently comes up and what changes each time. My thoughts and feelings around partnership, family, and career are always evolving, but my love of beautiful things in beautiful places always seems to stay the same!

Elin is 29, Swedish, and lives in Belgium with her French husband and their two daughters. She’s an artist and writer, known for her books Mindful Embroidery (2020) and When Will You Get a Real Job (2024). She also runs two Substack publications:

It may sound strange, but when asked to create my vision board for retirement, my instant thought was that I wish to never retire. This requires an added clarification; I wish to never retire from the work I’ve created (my art and writing). But I do wish to retire from the financial pressure that is inevitably involved (especially while also raising a family).

Retirement for me therefore means financial freedom more than anything else. Freedom to afford a peaceful mind that can pay attention to the subtle but most important joys of life; those that we’re surrounded with every day, but tend to forget or foresee in the sea of everyday stressors.

My vision board therefore aims to capture those moments that make the mundane beautiful, those hidden details of beauty like how the light travels through the kitchen, a joyful sink, paintings and plants in your bathroom because even the “shit-place” deserves to be beautiful… book for breakfast, space for arts and dreaming, time to roam the vintage markets, textures, colours, greenery - everything circulates around the feeling that a place brings, and how that feeling lead to peace, inspiration and financial freedom to create what the heart desires.

Élise is a 41-year-old French brand strategist and wedding dress designer who lives in Lisbon with her husband and their three kids. She also runs an Instagram account and writes the newsletter Sur-Mesure:

The first image represents my life goal—I don’t need anything else. But if I were to expand on it, it would look like the second vision board.

Emmanuelle is a 37-year-old French Cameroonian living in Italy. She works as a freelance sub-editor, copywriter, and translator for luxury brands. She writes Journal Curioso:

I could have chosen to do a mood board, but I preferred writing my vision board because I am a visual person. I can see images in my head, yet only words will come out—or rather, I feel only words can express what I am seeing in my head best. 

It has been challenging to think about the last thirty years of my life because I can barely think about the next five years. I know, though, I have things I want, like a house to welcome family and friends, financial stability, and make money through writing. These are only three things, but they’ve been in my mind for enough time to understand they are the foundation to my well-being or, better said, what motivates me to keep doing what I do, living and enjoying my life to the fullest.

The Vision Board Of The Last Thirty Years Of My Life

Exactly eleven days ago, I celebrated my 37th birthday, and it dawned on me that I’d be in my forties in three years. Aging doesn’t scare me, but I am starting to look back at my life and look into my future life. I have always lived and am still living so much in the present that it is odd to write to you, my future older self.

I am trying to imagine your life, and I will work smarter - not just harder - to get that house with multiple rooms to welcome your brother and his family. Your nephews are 12, 9, 5, and 1, and you want them to have a space where they can come on holidays and spend quality time with you because, be it at 37, 67 or 107, you’ll always be their cool aunt. The house will be in Italy, the country that stole your heart when you were a teen, and will be spacious enough to welcome friends for lunch or dinner or even have some of them sleep over after some great laughs and glasses of wine. I will need to see with your lover where this house will be: in the countryside? by the sea or in town?

Writing is our passion, so I picture you writing and making a career out of it through Le Journal Curioso and podcasting. Maybe you will finally have written the books you wanted to tell your nephews and niece where they are from. Our family is made of beautiful stories between France and Cameroon, and I hope by the time you reach the last thirty years of your life, there will be more stories like our family’s in books, movies, series, and podcasts because right now, they are missing in France and Europe.

I hope you will become a financially savvy person as you grow older. When I look back at our childhood, we grew up in an environment where there was both abundance and scarcity: when our father had money, he was large, yet when he had a little less, he would go into panic mode, making us feel we didn’t have anything. This experience turned us into a teen and a young adult with a strong sense of resourcefulness and resilience but also many fears around money. But at 67, I hope you will have come to term with all of this, and will have have become smarter with your money. I hope money will have become a means rather than a necessity for you.

Gabbi is a financial planner and coach based in L.A. She’s a Certified Financial Planner™ (CFP®), Accredited Financial Counselor (AFC®), and Trauma of Money Certified Practitioner. You can read her Money Feelings interview here and explore her services on her website. (Paid subscribers get 25% off).

When I was a kid, my family took a vacation to Hawaii which changed my life - because I saw hula dancing and decided it looked a lot more fun than wearing ballet tights! I quit ballet and enrolled in a hula dancing class as soon as we were back home and it has taught me so many important values that guide my life now, like the quote at the bottom - "kūlia i ka nu'u" or "strive for the highest."

As I envision my retirement era, I see myself continuing to strive to be better than the person I was yesterday, whether that be in my relationships, hobbies, or being of service to others. This exercise actually felt pretty easy, maybe in part because I'm crystal clear on my values - and if you've never sat down to iron those out, I highly recommend googling "values card exercise" and then writing them somewhere you'll see them everyday as a starting point. 

A last quick note - I'm planning for an '"early retirement," because I want to shift toward more volunteering and advocacy work. I used to be an elementary and middle school teacher and miss the classroom a lot! I'm sure I'll find a way back, hopefully teaching personal finance 😉 !

Georgina is a 39-year-old illustrator, artist and art consultant. She lives in Surrey Hills, UK with her husband and three kids. You can discover her work on her website and Instagram.

My husband and I would hopefully like to retire when we can still enjoy hiking, cycling and swimming together in the UK and the Continent. We currently love holidaying in France and Austria when we can.  I’d also like time to read, paint and maybe garden. Of course we’d also want to spend a lot of time cooking for and eating with friends and family, hopefully a bit of dancing too.

We lived in London for 20 years.  When we got pregnant with our third (and last) baby we moved out to leafy Weybridge where I grew up, it’s in the suburbs of London near to the beautiful Surrey Hills, here we have the support of family, old friends and a great community of new friends at the kids school.  We miss London and loved our life and friends there but can still drive or catch the train into London for work or everything the city has to offer. 

Keris is 53 and the bestselling author of fourteen novels (!), including adult and YA romcoms, as well as a Christmas novel for younger readers that isn’t a romance—but does feature a talking pug. She recently moved back to the British seaside town where she grew up, along with her two sons.

Her first non-fiction book, The Harry Styles Effect, about discovering herself through fandom, is coming in March 2025.

She also writes two newsletters:

I really enjoyed making the vision board and I've made it the lockscreen on my phone. I was struck by how much of it is what I need/want now - but then I am 53, so possible retirement isn't too far away - and also by how much of it I already have.

Léa is 39. She lives next to Paris with her husband and dog. She's a Principal Designer.

Since getting my dog and approaching my forties, I’ve been missing nature terribly. I live just outside of Paris and have been a city person my whole life, but having a dog pushed me to get my driver’s license and seek out wide-open spaces to spend time with her. It completely changed my definition of happiness. Add to that a lockdown in Auvergne during Covid and a burnout in 2022, and now I dream of having a big garden and spending my free time in nature with my dog. It’s not necessarily a long-term vision—I hope I won’t have to wait until retirement to live like in that picture—but I fantasize about finding a place surrounded by nature where I can settle down for good. Honestly, the sooner, the better, but I hope it will last at least until retirement and beyond.

For now, I’m still near Paris because of my husband’s work, because of the mortgage, and mostly because we don’t know where we’d go if we left. So, for the time being, we take short weekend trips around France, searching for a place we’ll fall in love with. We felt a bit of that in Haute-Savoie, but in Annecy, a house costs a million. And we’re starting from scratch, having built a modest nest egg that’s far from enough for that.

There’s another point when we talk about retirement—I don’t have kids, and I don’t plan to have any, so statistically, there’s a good chance I’ll end up spending my later years alone. So, when I picture myself very old, I imagine it ideally with, but also possibly without, my husband.

I hope to be the kind of retired woman who gardens, paints, reads tarot cards, and heals her neighbors with medicinal plants and grandmother’s remedies. 🧙‍♀️

Leonora is based in Pasadena, CA, and is a digital media executive specializing in design and interiors. You can explore her work on her website or follow her on Instagram. She is the author of the newsletter Schmatta:

My parents are artists, and even in their 70s, they are still working, so I see the same for myself. I don't want to be putting in a 40 hour week, but I'd like to be doing a little bit of something, especially if it's a brand I've built myself. I'd love to split time between California and France and do maybe 1-2 big trips a year.

Noha is 41 and lives in Ottawa, Canada with her husband and two kids. She’s an IT analyst and the writer behind Letters from a Muslim Woman:

My thoughts and process around creating this future-self vision board was firstly, “I can’t do a vision board! I’m HORRIBLE at visuals.” Thank God for Canva templates and a little bit of copy paste.

For retirement, what I envision is time to be able to do the things I love. I work a 9-to-5; I’m happily married, and I have two kids with lots of their own interests and goals, which makes my day-to-day extremely hectic.

In the past couple of years, I’ve started to prioritize finding time for my passions, but it really feels like all I get is a taste, instead of the full meal. What I want for my future self is an abundance of time for the things I love: writing, walking through the forest, kayaking, traveling with my husband and also with my sisters, experiencing life in Egypt, which is the country of my parents’ heritage. I also want to dedicate time to my worship: read more Quran, pray, spend time at my local mosque.

Picture Your Future, Your Way

There’s so much to unpack from these vision boards, but let me focus on three key takeaways:

1. There’s no one-size-fits-all when dreaming about your Future Self. It’s your vision, your rules.

When I first sat down to imagine mine, I felt totally overwhelmed. Where do I even start? And then came the flood of limiting beliefs: “Do I really deserve this?” “Am I asking for too much?” or “Is this too extravagant?” I even felt a little embarrassed sharing it.

But let me tell you, pushing through those thoughts was worth every second.

2. There’s no right way to express your dreams.

Whether you’re a design wizard, a Canva copy-and-paste expert, a scissors-and-glue visionary, or prefer letting ChatGPT handle the heavy lifting, the options are endless.

If writing feels more natural, a letter to your future self—or even just bullet points on a Post-it—works just as well.

Make it yours.

3. Envisioning your future isn’t enough.

Manifesting your financial future alone won’t make it happen. You have to turn those dreams into clear financial actions—and take them!

But if planning for retirement feels like a drag, your vision board can be the perfect starting point. It’ll give you clarity, a clearer roadmap for financial steps, and the motivation you need to take care of your Future Self.

The Paid Subscribers' Corner

Book a Session With Me

The first three people who book will get a 45-minute session to dive into their vision board. This isn’t a formal coaching session or financial advice—just a chance to help you get clarity. We’ll cover:

• A set of questions to help you zero in on and refine your ideas.

• Finding the most natural way for you to bring your vision board to life.

• Answering any burning questions you might have.

Ready to chat? Send me a message—I’m excited to meet you!

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Don’t forget—paid subscribers get a 25% discount on Gabbi Cerezo’s financial planning and coaching services. This one’s a gem for my U.S. readers.

🎁 How to Gift Your Future Self Financial Peace: Tips From a Planner

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And to wrap up the Future Self topic in style, here’s your mixtape to dive into before we meet again in two weeks to tackle a completely different subject!

🟣 My retirement-era vision board.

🟣 A CNBC article on women’s biggest financial regrets.

🟣 Six psychological reasons you neglect your future self.

🟣 A Wikipedia page on present bias.

🟣 The book that helped me the most in preparing for all our sessions on the Future Self.

🟣 Three crucial facts about your future self (double-check that you know them well).

🟣 Four quick exercises to define your situation, goals, and commitment to your future self.

🟣 A calculator to determine your date of death!

Pauline 💜