Retirement Won’t Just Happen—You Have To Make It Happen

Early in our adult lives it is difficult to focus on something so far away as retirement. If you’re young and healthy, now is now time to start planning and setting aside retirement.

Many who launched careers in the middle of the last century went to work for one company, stayed 30 years and retired with a nice pension. Federal Government kicked in some social security benefits and incomes in retirement looked much like they did during their working years. Retirement lasted only ten or fifteen years on average and there were no problems.

If you’re yet to celebrate your 40th birthday, you are likely in a very singular situation. You’ll likely change employers much more often. There will be no pension and social security benefits will almost certainly represent a lower percentage of your income during retirement than it was for people who retired before 2000.

Added to that the fact that you are such as to live a very long time. If you take care of yourself, you could easily live to be 100 years old. You probably already knew that. Did you think about the fact that if you are able to be 100 and you retire at 65, you’ll need enough money to live for 35 years without a job? You may not be 35 years old yet! That’s a long time to go without a job.

You’re thinking i need a lot of money. Optimally, you’ll end up with a nest egg so big the number would scare you. You may really need to have more than a $1 million when you retire (depending on inflation and the lifestyle you want). It is virtually impossible to rescue up the sort of money you’ll need in the last ten or even 15 years of your career, no matter how well you’re doing then.

That means that you need to go sober right now. If you’re not contributing generously to your company’s 401k plan, start today. Stop reading, call human resources to set it up, then finish reading this article.

Even if you are contributing to your 401k, you may not be contributing enough. Talk to a financial professional to understand how much you’ll really need to retire when you’d like. If you can’t contribute to a 401k because your employer doesn’t offer one, is sure to contribute to an IRA. If you or your spouse don’t have an earned income, investment for him, too, in an IRA.

Don’t cop out and tell me you’ll never retire because you really like to work. I’m not believing in it. If you are permitted to be 102, I don’t believe you’ll work up until the end. You may even genuinely want to work until you’re 102, but I don’t know numerous people that age who are still working at all, let alone earning anything like what they did in their prime. Ultimately, retirement will be required on you even if you don’t want to retire.
Be ready or be sorry!