How Much Money Do I Need To Retire With? Is It Enough To Live On?

Everyone’s looking for a simple answer to every retirement and mortgage question as if it’s not different for everyone’s unique situation. Everyone is different and everyone wants different things in life. The question is: What do you want?

Do The Math

Figure out how much you’re spending every month right now and multiply it 12 and then multiply that by 35, so that you can retire at 65 and live until you’re 100 years old. So if your spending $2,000 per month right now and want to maintain that lifestyle from 65 years old to 100 years old so you’ll need $840,000 total. That sounds like a very big number doesn’t it?

Hopefully you can pay off you mortgage by the time you’re 65 so that you can retire in a paid off home. That used to be the goal most people had back in the day. Now it’s buy a home, refinance my home and give me cash, get a home equity loan and give me cash or refinance my home back over 30 years to GIVE ME CASH. That means you’re going to be 65 with another 20-30 years left to pay of your mortgage because you needed cash for who knows what.

You’re going to have to so the math for your situation to see how much you need on a monthly or yearly basis WITHOUT social security money. I know it’s YOUR MONEY and yada yada but it may not be so start thinking of it as gone and it will be a bonus if you ever get any of it. Start working on your retirement fund and grow it as much as you can so that you have something to live on when you retire.

You’re going to have to live on a very fixed income because you income will never go up while inflation does go up. Let’s assume when you turn 65 you have $500,000 in your retirement fund and $30,000 in your savings account. You’ll have to divide that amount over 35 years to give yourself until your 100 years old to live on that same amount month to month.

Nowadays you can also make a living blogging like I am already. I have a good income coming from this blog and I don’t spend too much time on it. I talk about mortgages, getting approved for loans, saving money and retirement ideas. Pick any subject you want and run with it. Pay someone to build you a nice blog and show you how to add posts and you’ll start getting views in a few months. Add a post a day, allow for comments to be made and get an RSS feed that people can subscribe to so they can read every post you write.

You can do that even when you’re 75 years old because it doesn’t require any manual labor OR a boss to tell you what you can and can’t do. You do what you want and no one reading your blog will have any idea how old you are.

There may be other online opportunites that you could take advantage of if you still wanted to try and make more money when you retire. Learn how to trade stocks in a safe way without risking all of your savings. There are many people out there making a living online that will last far past the age of 65.

I wish I had a direct answer for you such as you will need $400,000 to retire plain and simple, but it doesn’t work like that. You’re going to have to do some math yourself and figure out what will make you feel comfortable for the last 35 years of your life.

If you come up with $2,000 per month and you don’t think it will satisfy you for that long then you need to add up the amount of time you have until you’re 65 years old. If you have 10 years left and you get a second job as a waiter or anything like that you could make an extra $100 per week without much effort.

$100 x 52 weeks = $10,400 per year x 10 years = $104,000

$104,000 over 35 years is an additional $8,500 per year which could help you a lot. Like I said, there are also things you can do after you retire on the computer so maybe you should start researching them now while you have the chance and gain the knowledge before you retire.

The worst thing you can do is to keep putting it off. You need to keep paying attention to it because you’re going to be living it before you know it. The better you set yourself up the happier you’ll be later on. Math is real, it’s not going to change because you stop looking at it.

Knowledge Will Save You Thousands
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