Rethinking Retirement

Is it time to rethink how we look at retirement? Why you should consider semi-retirement to fund your lifestyle as you transition into retirement.

What do I mean by Rethinking Retirement?  Many of you, may be thinking about traditional retirement as somebody that maybe works for a company for 30 or 40 years, they retire, and then they never work another day in their life. What I want to talk about in today’s blog is re-thinking that and maybe going into what could be more of a semi-retirement stage. Why would you want to do that?

The number one reason that you may want to do that is it may help you get into retirement a little bit sooner. You may be finding that as you’re doing some of your financial planning, you’re just a little bit short of truly being able to meet all of your cashflow needs as you go into retirement. Maybe quitting your main job and going into a semi-retirement stage where you still have some income coming in could help to fill in some of those cashflow gaps.

The other reason that you may want to consider doing that is people are obviously living longer and that’s a good thing, but what it also means is that we have to have our portfolio assets last for a much longer time period maybe than our parents and our grandparents.

The other reason as well is healthcare costs. This is something that I’ve talked pretty extensively about here on the blog, and it continues to be one of the top concerns for many of the people that we talk to that are either in retirement already or people that are going into retirement and that’s how am I going to pay for all of my healthcare costs? What are some ways that you can do this? Well, if you’re working right now, or you’re going into that semi-retirement stage, one of the first things you may want to look into is maybe doing something within your same field. If you’ve worked 30 or 40 years in a particular area, you may have some ability to do some freelance work, maybe some part time consulting, and you can do this maybe a little bit more on your own time schedule as opposed to your company’s time schedule, and you can pick up those extra jobs to help to fill in some of those cashflow needs.

Another thing I want to talk about here as well are maybe some new economy ways that you can earn some additional income. One of the things that I personally have been pretty fascinated by is Uber. I’m not sure how many people are familiar with Uber, but basically, it is a service where you can actually drive your own car and make a little bit of extra money through an app where you can pick up people and get fares, like a taxi cab essentially. I take Ubers almost every time I travel and talking with some of the people out there driving for Uber, they can make anywhere from $500 to maybe as much as $800 in a week. And again, you can do this on your own schedule, so if you wake up on Saturday morning and it’s raining outside, not much going on, you can say, hey, I’m going to drive for Uber for a couple of hours and make a little bit of extra money.

Another example of this is a family friend that does some dog sitting with her Mom, and they have a very niche business, they only watch dogs that are, I think, under 25 pounds, and they actually watch our dog when we go on vacation. With some of their friends and family that they watch dogs for and we feel a lot more comfortable sending our dog to them as opposed to sending it to a pet hotel where they may be in a cage.

There are lot of creative ways that you can maybe make some additional income for your retirement, get into that retirement mode a little bit faster, maybe use it to fund some fun things. Maybe you can use that extra income to fund some travel and do the things you want to do while you’re young and healthy.