Random Retirement Thoughts
Miscellaneous Things to Think About with Your Retirement
Retirement is important and is a topic I keep coming back to. It could be because I work for a financial services company that targets the lower to middle income Americans so my day-to-day is full of seeing people squeaking by. But for most of us who aren’t born into ridiculous generational wealth, you spend some of your life working and then later on you retire.
Now, in the typical American life path you work 40 years in a job you are indifferent to for the hope of retiring around 65 and enjoying your last years playing golf (poorly) and watching the news (loudly).
Many people are trying to avoid this by retiring early. You have the FIRE folks who go the froogal route and try to minimize their lifetime spending to make mediocre income last. You have other people chasing big wins through businesses for the hope of getting big wealth.
But whichever path you go on: FIRE, Big Wealth, or 40 years and a 401k; at some point we all want to take the foot off the gas and enjoy a nice retirement.
Sadly, a lot of people are ill-prepared or under-planned when it comes to retirement. They are just doing a hodge-podge of random advice they heard over the years with little understanding and foresight.
This post will cover some of the major themes I view as important when planning for your eventual retirement whenever it is.
Make sure to search the substack for retirement related posts as there is so many different things it could never be covered in just 1 post - in fact there is a 7 part series all about retirement that starts here
This will be a bit of a refresher and some miscellaneous items that don’t get their own post.
Now, everyone who reads this stack should be set up to kill it. If you have followed the automated budgeting system of 50/25/25, you are stacking a lot of cash into investments for retirement and doing it in the most automated and streamlined manner.
Those 2 things alone will put you miles ahead of your peer group.
But maybe you have family - parents or grandparents or siblings - that struggle. Or maybe you just find the concept of how to retire successfully interesting and want to hear what some of the pitfalls are out there.
If you want to have a successful retirement, you need to consider items like…