How to Retire Early

I’ve been retired now for just over a year.  During the weeks before I left the workforce, I found that each of my peers reacted differently to my big news.  Some were genuinely happy for me; some were a bit jealous; some were skeptical; some thought it was just a dumb idea.  But the common theme among them is that they also had a plan to retire.  Or did they?

I was interested in why each person reacted differently to my retirement when they all planned to do the same thing themselves.  After all, who has a plan to just work forever?  Who doesn’t imagine what their life would be like once they no longer have to devote almost all of their waking hours to earning money at their workplace?

When I carefully dug a little bit deeper into their retirement plans, I found that these people didn’t really have a plan.  Most would respond with something like “I plan to retire at 60” or “I plan to retire when my kids graduate from college” or even “I plan to travel after I retire.”  Does that sound familiar to you?  Well, I have some bad news for you.  Those are not plans, those are dreams.

Retirement is one of the biggest decisions that you will make in your life.  It ranks up there with choosing your career, buying your first house, getting married, and starting a family.  Yet, a surprising lack of early planning goes into retirement.  Even more frightening is that you may not be entirely in control of the timing of your retirement.  It seems that more and more, employers are looking for a younger, less expensive workforce. They are willing to sacrifice your wisdom and experience earned from years in the workforce to “make their numbers on Wall Street.”  Whether you want to believe it or not, you may not be part of their plans.

So what does a plan look like?  It’s not a simple matter of saving enough money, although that’s perhaps the most important aspect of a plan.  Where are you going to live?  What are you going to do with your time?  What is your spouse going to do?  Clearly, each of us will have different answers to those questions.  How do you figure out which of those questions are most important to you?  How to go about finding the answers to them?  I’ll lay the steps you might want to follow to Retire Right in my next post.