It got me thinking after I had been to one of the “Retire Wealthy”
meetings, and had listened to speaker after speaker telling us we had to
have X-hundreds of thousands of dollars in Savings, Investments and
Retirement plans.
The ”experts” tell us that if you are currently earning $50,000.00 a year
then you need to have something like half a million dollars in investments
and retirement funds so that you can maintain your life style (some
experts suggest as much as $1.3 million when future inflation is taken
into consideration). The benchmark they use is that your investments
have to generate at least 80% of your pre-retirement income.
As I was listening to all this I was thinking to myself:
#1 That isn't going to happen, because at age 53 I don't have enough
working years left, and even if I contributed every penny I made, I would
still fall short, and what would we live on in the mean time?
#2 There has to be a lot of people that have never worked for a company or
business that has a pension plan or, for whatever reason, have no
retirement savings (75 million Americans work for companies with no
retirement plan. 50% of American adults over 50 years of age do not
have any retirement savings, with only 33% actively planning their
retirement. An astonishing 25% of all Americans have ZERO savings of
any kind).
#3 There has to be a Plan B or C, or D, or something, that is actually
workable.
The first thing I had to do was to see where their logic broke down.
It's right there - “maintain your lifestyle” - that is where it all comes
apart.
I don't want that lifestyle.
What I want is my place in the country where I can strive to live in a
sustainable manner and move toward being as self-sufficient as possible.
To have as few as possible living expenses and no debt. NO Mortgage,
NO Car Payment, NO Credit Card bills or Credit Card debt, and not having
to work unless I want to or if it is too cold in the winter to do anything
else so might as well earn a few extra bucks.
So, I sat down and started working out the numbers and putting together
examples to show that, NO, you do not need a half million dollars, not
even a quarter of a million, not even a hundred thousand bucks. I
set out to prove to myself and my wife, that if we kept doing the things
we were doing, with some effort we could, over the next few years, rid
ourselves of all debt, mortgage, power and natural gas bills, as well as a
large part of the grocery bill. That I could, in fact, retire comfortably
with only a small pension and without having to be a greeter at Wal-mart
until I am 90.
So, now the question is, “What steps do we have to take to get to that
point, and how is it all going to play out as we plan our retirement?”
