Needing Money in Retirement?

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You may already be retired, or you may just be thinking about retirement.  Either way, most retirees wonder if they will have enough money to enjoy their retirement (the so called “Golden Years”).

My husband is a Financial Advisor and he is always talking to me about whether our retirement savings will be enough for us to enjoy life.  He’s always telling me to plan on living up to 30 years past retirement.  In fact, 47% of baby boomers (which we are) do not have enough savings for retirement.   I’m already retired.

Retiring Early

Actually I retired early at age 53 because of several reasons (health, a bad working environment, plus I took a “buy out” from my government job.  I was age 53 at the time, so I retired 2 years earlier than I otherwise would have been eligible.  With the buyout money we were able to pay off our home mortgage which left us for the first time debt-free – it felt wonderful.  Many of my husbands customers talk to him about retiring early but have no where near the savings to actually do so.

Some customers have a “windfall” like an inheritance or win a monetary prize and are ready to quit their jobs and retire – but when he looks over their debs and savings, there is no way he can advise them to retire – they do not have enough saved to do so.  In addition, those who seem to have gained a monetary windfall, tend to spend it in just a few years.

Retirement Spending Goals

Since my retirement in 2006, we have purchased a new vehicle and also a “Retirement Home”, both of which has put us back into debt.  My husband finally retired at age 65 and we are doing well.  But he has had a heart attack and four heart by-passes.  I really want him to enjoy many retirement years so we can spend some time traveling together like we have always planned and having a relaxed, loose schedule for once in our lives.

 

My wise husband has had us saving for retirement for many years now and were it not for my health issues, we would be pretty set for enjoying our Golden Years.  We live on a budget more than we have ever before in our marriage now that we are both retired.  We also want to be able to continue helping our missionary daughter’s family and our five grandkids during our retirement.

Create a Retirement Budget

When my husband retired, we learned to live on my pension and and our savings, putting off taking his social security as long as we can.  This is definitely a reduction from our working income.  So we have created a significantly lower “retirement budget.”

Supplementing our Retirement Budget

Our retirement goals are the major reason I began to research ways to bring in some sort of additional retirement income in addition to our savings and my pension.  I checked out various “work at home” schemes – almost all scams, except for some very low paying online surveys and tasks from Amazon’s MTurk site.  I considered transcription and did some research and learning about the skills needed for that and I’ve continued to help a few people build their own small business websites, as well as selling some of my artwork (I’m a digital and traditional artist).

But when I found The Wealthy Affiliate Program, I knew I had struck gold and I’ve been working steadily at building a decent passive affiliate income to supplement our retirement budget.  I’m giving myself at least three years to reach the level of supplemental income I think will work for us and I’m enjoying every minute.  I love to learn and this training is awesome and challenging as well as very exciting with the promise of what it may bring to us.

You can read my Review of The Wealthy Affiliate Program here

Comments

Thanks for looking at my site and coming to this page.  I would love for you to leave any questions or comments below. – Shirley