How to Write a Decades Letter to Open on NYE 2030

I’m SO EXCITED for NYE 2020 not because we’re hitting a fancy party or even doing anything fun (team stay-at-home here!) but because we did something 10 years ago that we get to see come to life this New Year’s Eve…

Chris and I wrote Decades Letters (aka a letter about what you think your life will be like in 10 years) wayyyy back on NYE 2010 when we were engaged with no kids.

We didn’t read the other’s letter then and we sealed them in an envelope and put them in the safe with the label ‘do not open until 2020’. So this NYE, it’s time to tear those letters open and laugh – or maybe cry – about what we thought our lives would be like back when we were 10 years younger.

I honestly can’t even remember what predictions I made for our lives then, but I’d bet that I was off on how many kids we’d have (probably not this many, 😉 ) and what I’d be doing, career-wise, at this point (safe to say I didn’t predict that I’d be a content creator with a kickass community, too).

We didn’t have any ‘rules’ or boundaries as to what we wrote – I think the prompt was just ‘write what you think our lives will be like in 10 years’.

I don’t necessarily treat mine like a ‘goals’ list or something super strict to strive for, it’s meant to be a fun guess at what our family and lives will look like in the future.

If you’re looking for ideas to write your own ‘letter for the future’ or ‘Decades letter’ here are a few ideas as to what you could write about:

• personal life: friendships, relationships, etc.
• professional life: a role at work, a degree or an advanced degree? maybe a financial goal?
• your children: how many? what kind of people will they be? what will they do?
• travel life: where will you have gone?
• goals: what big and small goals will you have accomplished?

Chris and I plan to write ourselves another 10-year letter to be opened in 2030 using some of the ideas above.

Since we have kids old enough to think about their futures, too, I put together a little printable sheet of prompts for Quinn (age 7) and Cooper (age 5) to fill out as well. Since kids change SO MUCH in such a short timeframe, we’ll do theirs in a 5-year increment versus 10 (aka we’ll open these in 2025).

I created this printable of prompts for your kids to create their own predictions for the future – just download it, print it, and have your child fill it out with their predictions for the future!

Here’s the list of questions in a non-printable list:

• favorite sport – aka what they think their favorite sport will be in the future
• favorite color – aka what they think their favorite color will be in the future
• favorite subject in school – aka what they think their favorite subject in school will be in the future
• favorite hobby/activity – aka what they think their favorite hobby/activity will be in the future
• what will I be when I grow up? – aka what they think they will be/want to be when they grow up
• where I want to live when I grow up? – aka what they think they will live/want to live when they grow up
• do you want to have kids when you grow up? if so, how many? this one is pretty self-explanatory
• if you could be famous, what would it be for? – this one is pretty self-explanatory

To grab this sheet without the 2020 watermark & my website URL, click here.

See more Parties and Celebrations:

Any other predictions for the future or ‘decades letters’ ideas that I missed?