Taking Early Retirement - I Retired Early

January 29, 2010
by Jeremiah
0 comments

Retirement Planning, Planning, Planning

If you’ve heard it once, you have heard it a thousand times. It is all about blank, blank, blank. This time it is all about planning, planning, planning.

When it comes to thinking about retirement, a lot of people find themselves a little confused on what they should and should not be expecting. With all of the news media coverage putting fear into people that there will be nothing available to them when they are ready to retire, many people fear even looking into the subject matter because of possible disappointment they may receive. The fact is though, everyone has to face the ups and downs of retirement, the best thing that you can do is to seek out as much retirement planning information as possible. Really, if you’re retiring early, you won’t be able to count on any government help until you are in your sixties. So what are you worried about?

So Where Do You Get The Best Retirement Information?

You need to keep in mind that you should have more than just what the government can give you towards your retirement as you probably have some sort of pension or something of that nature that you can count on as well. Using all available resources is something that you are going to have to do in order to make sure that your retirement years are as comfortable as possible. Just about all of the retirement information out there will explain that to you, so it is important to make sure that you are pulling all of your resources together. Use all of the hints and tips that you learn through the retirement information that you receive.

Where To Look

Continue Reading →

January 22, 2010
by Jeremiah
0 comments

Investing For Retirement Course 101

I have a few basic tenets for investing;

(1) I do not Buy and Hold

(2) I tend to be more Aggressive than Conservative

(3) When the market is bad in the United States, I invest in other countries

(4) I do not buy bonds or CDs for the long term and

KISS

I’m sure there are other tenets but these are the five I try to keep in mind when I am investing.

I use some free tools available on the Internet; (1) Stock Charts (2) Fund Alarm and (3) Yahoo! Finance to help me with my investment decisions. Formerly I used Yahoo! Finance for all of my charting. But I like all of the features of the Stock Charts web site and it is more useful to me now that I have learned the ins and outs. Both Stock Charts and Yahoo! are free so try them both to see which you like better. Yahoo! has a feature on their charts called Interactive Charting, which is nice. I also use Yahoo! to track my portfolio online. Let’s take a look at Stock Charts.

If you go to the Stock Charts web site the chart that shows up on the left, is $INDU. $INDU is the Dow Jones Industrial Average symbol that Stock Charts uses and it shows the market for today. On Yahoo! they use the symbol ^DJI. Yahoo! has a little chart on the right side that shows the activity for the day. If I were a day trader, that might be useful, but since I am not, I like the charts from Stock Charts better.

In charting a stock or mutual fund there is an expression that goes, “The trend is your friend.” So you should always go with the way the trend is going. On purchases, if the trend is up, you want to be a buyer. And conversely if the trend is down, you want to be a seller. So you buy when the trend starts up, but when exactly? And how do you know that you are not buying at the top? Those are two good questions. I’ll answer the first question in this post. So let’s take a look at an example. Continue Reading →

January 15, 2010
by Jeremiah
0 comments

Starting With Only $100,000

So you’ve made up your mind to take an early retirement. Good for you! Early retirement, before 62, means that you will not have any social security coming every month that you can count on. In a future article I’ll tell you how to get money out of your 401k or IRA before 59½, but let’s assume that you only have so much cash right now.

A frequent question I get is where do you put money so you can live off of it, now that banks are paying 1 – 3% interest? To keep the numbers easy, let’s say you have $100,000. If you have $250,000 then multiply this example by 2.5. If you only have $50,000 then multiply this example by .5.

$100,000 at 1% is only $1,000 per year. This is not enough to live on. Even if you get 3% it will only be $3000 a year or $250 a month. I don’t know about you but $250 will not go very far at my house every month. Never mind gas for the car, utilities, etc. So I need more. $3,000 just is not going to be enough to live on. You either need a higher percentage of earnings or a larger nest egg or both. This is where proper planning comes into the financial planning picture. Continue Reading →

January 14, 2010
by Jeremiah
0 comments

The Importance Of Early Retirement Health Insurance

If you are considering early retirement, there are three kinds of health you need to be concerned about – Physical, Financial and Mental.

Obviously, the most important health you need to have are the financial resources needed to implement a retired lifestyle. Your financial health is your first concern. Many people have this as their first stumbling block to overcome.

In addition to financial health is the consideration of physical health. Therefore, an individual should look into early retirement health insurance. If you have considerable financial resources, then you might want to consider a Major Medical policy. This is otherwise known as a catastrophic policy. It picks up medical expenses after you pay a significant deductible and covers you so you don’t get wiped out during a health crisis.

Specifically, when looking at early retirement health insurance it is important Continue Reading →

January 7, 2010
by Jeremiah
0 comments

Retirement Planning Spreadsheet

So when do you start to plan for your early retirement? Remember “Thought and effort” from an earlier post? The best time to start your retirement planning is now. The way I started, was to determine where I was. Then what age did I want to retire? And then I had to figure out what I would need in dollars to get there.

Let’s say you were born in 1960. In 2010, you are going to be 50 this year. (Don’t forget to join the AARP! They offer discounts on “stuff”.) Social security, if it is still around, won’t start for you for another 12 years at 62. So you won’t have to worry about that calculation for a while yet. But still, you should be getting a social security statement every year about 90 days before your birthday. It shows what your projected benefit is at 62, 66 and 70.

If you are 50 this year, you might want to retire at 55. That’s five years from now. So the first thing to figure out is where you are right now – today – and the method I used for that was to have a retirement spreadsheet calculator.

Take a look at this spreadsheet from Google Docs:

TER Retirement Planning Spreadsheet

I call this spreadsheet xxx nnnn Retirement. xxx represents the month you want to retire and nnnn represents the year. Continue Reading →