How To Retire With Complete Security
Retirement is one of those great land marks in a life time. Like all of the great milestones, it is packed full of emotion and expectation.
Your 18th and 21st birthdays were times for hope and optimism for the approaching adult years and all tat life will bring you, and equally retiring should be about all the opportunity to do the things we spend our working lives looking forward to having the chance to do. Spending time with our nearest and dearest and indulging in our hobbies and interests. Inevitable, there will also be some regret than we are leaving behind our careers and our workmates, and an enormous part of how we define ourselves.
The one emotion that all but the very fortunate among us is sure to feel upon retirement is anxiety. A degree of nervous uncertainty about whether the financial arrangements we made for our later years will indeed be sufficient to see us through; particularly in the traumatic circumstance we find ourselves living in.
A number of factors combine to make recent times the most challenging to retire into. The great advances in medical science leading to increased life expectancy, a decrease in employee benefits from employers ever conscious of the tighten grip of market conditions and shareholder returns, lower general returns from investments as the market struggles with essentially an macro version of the of the difficult financial position we all find ourselves in every day. On top of these we have the pressure of every increasing costs of living. Nothing ever gets any cheaper, does it!
As with most things in life, the key to having sufficient retiring income is planning. In recent years the burden of retirement planning has shifted from governments and corporations firmly towards the individual.
The first thing to do is to figure out how much you are likely to require, to have the sort of retirement you would like. Many of our current expenses will have changed for the better by then.
Most of us would have liked to settle our mortgages and other home loans by then. The costs of actually working will have gone as well. Such things as the costs of travelling to work, the need to run two cars, the cost of lunches and clothes etc.
Other costs will rise though, as you take more holidays, or spend more money indulging your hobbies.
There are plenty of Income calculators and sites with very useful information for those contemplating retirement planning available online, but just by way of a sobering reality check, it is estimated that to have a retirement income of , 000 per year, one needs to have a nest egg of capital of about Million!
The secret of getting this sort of money together is to start saving very early and to be honest with yourself about just how much needs to be tucked away each month.
An option that most at least consider to attempt to make what they have managed to save go that little bit further by taking a retirement job. Look closely at your hobbies at this point and see if there is any scope to capitalise on them.
This is most likely to be by capitalising on something you already do as a hobby. If you are a good photographer then buy yourself something like canon digital powershot camera and take some photos of things other people may pay more to get a copy of. Local landmarks, for instance.
Tags: nest egg, retirement