Put off your retirement as long as you can.
There’s good news and there’s bad news: both of them are: “we are living longer.”
The good news
On the good news side, it means that we have many extra years to enjoy ourselves with our friends and family, with our food and drink and with all our earthly pleasures. As long as we keep popping all the anti-cholesterol, anti-sugar and anti-high blood pressure pills, we keep going. We do all the blood tests every year, the doctor never gets out of his chair behind the desk, analyzes results, prescribes what we need and we keep going.
The bad news
The bad news, if the penny hasn’t dropped yet, is that our pensions, retirement plans and nest-eggs will all run out while we are still here. So it’s a race. Will we outlive our pension and end up poor and the miserable objects of state care, looking for personal loans, or will the pension outlive us and allow us to spend a respectable and pleasant old age in a retirement home?
Medical breakthroughs and healthier lifestyles are expanding our life expectancies and you simply can’t count on departing the way our parents and grandparents did.
What are the other plans?
Some retirees are returning to work, others are selling everything, buying a mobile home and roaming around the country. One friend exchanged his fancy apartment for a fancy yacht and is permanently moored in the some Mediterranean port. He never stops talking about the wine, the hot food and the hot women.
Pensions and Social Security
We still get these, but they buy less and less and if you venture outside the U.S. and you have to convert our dollars into anther currency, the result is frightening. For non-U.S. citizens, the social security checks in their country are a token only and have no meaning in the supermarkets.
What to do?
Now that you are faced with a longer retirement, you really have just two choices:
- Put off your retirement as long as you can.
- Plan better for your retirement more carefully, starting long before you retire.
As a final fall-back situation, there are always reverse mortgages after your pockets run dry in retirement.
Try and make your money immortal
We are surrounded by a giant conspiracy which is constantly trying to erode our nest egg, but the biggest retirement killer is our simple inability to maximize our retirement savings.
Retirement planning
Retirement planning isn’t a full-time job, but a full-time job is what many who fail to plan may face. Do you know how much you’ll need for a comfortable retirement? Have you lined up your future income and expenses to see if you’re sitting pretty or spooning down cat food? You’re not alone if you’re shaking your head. Last year’s 18th annual Retirement Confidence Survey indicated that less than half of American workers have taken the time to make basic retirement calculations.
Retirement services
There are retirement services which can help with tax planning and retirement account trends. They can suggest portfolios to help retirees achieve ideal asset-allocation strategies. Don’t wait until it’s too late! Seize control of your future by grabbing the wheel while you still can.
or here’s another idea…..move to Mexico and live well for far less.By the way we are not “under siege” down here as reported in the media. Ciudad Juarez and Tijuana are not typical which is where all the CNN videos are coming from.
If you fail to plan, you plan to fail. The catch 22 with retirement is that the traditional avenue of retirement income (social security and IRA) has become so hard to access at an age at which you’d be able to live long enough to enjoy it. That is why it is vital for people to get on retirement planning at the earliest possible time – so that you can retire before you can start drawing benefits and you won’t have to worry.