Work Now To Keep The Retirement Years Golden
It’s a fact that you have to work now to keep the retirement years golden. Or at least as ‘golden’ as we can make them, given the current remaking our economic system is undergoing. With both Social Security and Medicare staggering around like great wounded beasts, continuing to rely on the assumption that we’re going to have much of substance from either of those two programs is hardly the way to go about living well in our senior years.
Ponder on the reality of your economic situation whenever possible. Maybe you’re sitting there massaging your legs (that leg arthritis you’ve begun to develop from all those wild things you did in your misspent youth is beginning to grow more evident, right?) and you have an opportunity to read on how we’re not saving anywhere close the amount of money we’re going to need to fund a nice retirement when we’re too old to work hard. That’s bad news.
That’s why planning for a good retirement income NOW — rather than trying to cobble one together the year before one retires — is one of the single smartest things that can be done to ensure one won’t be relying ‘on the kindness of strangers, ‘ to quote the immortal Blanche DuBois of Tennessee Williams ‘Streetcar Named Desire’ fame. Making little changes to savings and investing activities in the present can pay off big time in the future.
But are we even saving or investing at all? Sure, we all watch the business networks and many of us understand stocks or bonds on one level. But, we’ve also been scared to death by stories of the financial collapse in the markets and the ongoing recession we’ve apparently been in since 2007. That shouldn’t stop us, though, from forcing ourselves into better savings and spending habits, for a fact.
As an example, take a look at a typical small business owner. He may have founded something like a fine costume jewelry wholesale distributor company, for instance. He has several employees but he’s still looking out for his own finances however he can. Does he have an IRA or two or has he set himself up with a thrift savings plan or a health savings account (good pre-tax advantages to that)? If not, all he’s got to rely on is Social Security, which isn’t good.
Well, the answer is not much if he hasn’t looked after his own basic retirement life first of all. At this point, to count on Social Security and Medicare to take care of our basic needs may doom us to a life of greatly diminished expectations and just at the time when we want to be able to enjoy the fruits of our life’s labor, so to speak. Not having additional retirement funds in our golden years is a completely avoidable situation, to be honest.
So, then: What to do? Well, above everything else it’s necessary to develop a plan NOW rather than try to come up with one during the last five years of our working lives (though if that’s all the time we have, it’s better than nothing). Don’t sit back and assume that Social Security is going to be much more than a very small chunk of the money you’ll need to survive, in other words. Look to your financial health as you would your personal health.
