I followed a post recently that asked “how much money do you need to retire?”.
I did this exercise a lot back in my early 30’s and it was at that point that I realized that this was not going to work for me. I think at the time I calculated that I would have to save like $1500 per month for the next 30 years to be able to truly retire when I was 60. Since at that time I didn’t even have a savings account and most often could barely even pay all of my bills, I realized that this was not going to happen.
I made two adjustments at that time. One, I focused my income based activities on residual income based plans and started figuring out how to lower my retirement expenses budget.
While it would have been nice to have that big boat, airplane, two motorcycles, RV, beach house, cars and all those other toys I dreamed of, I realized that they were most likely not going to happen and most importantly, that they weren’t going to make me happy. If I wanted to retire early I was going to have to learn how to be happy with less.
I see so many of my friends near the same age as me now who have 30 year mortgages at $2000 per month, car payments over $500 per month and they have financed just about everything else they have for who knows how much more per month. They need $5000 – $10,000 per month in income just to get by. No wonder so many think I must have hit the lottery in order to be able to quit working when I did.
Something to think about. If you had no mortgage, had no car payment and had nothing out there on credit how much would you require every month to live off of? If you are reading this and trying it, I would be thrilled to speak to you about it.
If you like that, then we can talk about ways to create residual income that covers this new amount and how long it’s going to take you in order to get there.
Have fun and enjoy life. If I don’t get to talk to you before then, see you next week.
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