It’s a New Era In Early Retirement
It’s a New Era In Early Retirement
Times have really changed. You can now look at an early retirement at a much younger age than it was ever possible before! I know that sounds incredible and out of the traditional box that we have thought about our whole lives.
You know the old story…. You get out of college, get a job and start saving for retirement, hopefully before you are thirty years old. As your career progressed, you hopefully found yourself with an employer who had a pension plan or at least a 401k program to which they contributed some amount of matching funds. All the time, you were conditioned to expect that retirement age was about 65 years of age and between your savings and social security, you would have a nice income to support your retirement lifestyle until you finally kick the bucket!
Well, all of that has changed rather dramatically! Today, the number of employers who provide significant retirement benefits has diminished greatly. With all of the outsourcing, downsizing, and corporate restructuring, most people are changing jobs every 5-7 years. This makes it difficult to have much continuity in saving for an early retirement. In fact, even the Social Security Administration has pushed the retirement age back to 67 -70 years of age.
Along the way, the IRA and 401k savings of many folks has been hurt by the lack of corporate profits, mergers and acquisitions, and the growing fees and service charges of the mutual fund managers. It has become very difficult to accumulate a significant retirement nest egg. The pressures of our culture have also hurt our ability to save for retirement. Many of us have given in to the wonderful new and bigger home, that flashy new car, and all of the rest of the toys. A Census Bureau survey reports that the average person turning 50 years of age in 2007, had more than $15,000 in credit card debt! Of course, the subprime mortgage problem serves to highlight the fact that many folks bought more expensive homes than they could afford.
Many of us are faced with such terrible trouble in our finances, that to maintain the dream of retiring by age 65 is becoming increasingly difficult. That is, if you continue to think along the lines of the old school.
Let’s go ‘outside the box’ for a moment, shall we? The internet has taken over our society during the past few years and is now well entrenched in everybody’s lives. It is so embedded in our culture that if you don’t capitalize on it, you will be missing a tremendous opportunity. With more than 200 million people on the internet every day, there are lots of ways that it can provide you with additional streams of income to help you save more for retirement or possibly, to retire early!
Among the many ways to generate some passive income on the internet are:
Affiliate Marketing – Setting up a webpage and advertisement for a company’s product (like Best Buy, Geico Insurance, Amazon, and thousands of others). As people find your site and click on your ads to go to the vendor and buy a product, you derive a nice commission on the transaction. You do not ever see or touch the product or the customer. Your ad just sits on the net all the time and you get your commissions – even while you sleep!
Article Marketing – You write timely articles about a topic of your passion and using advertisement provided by Google, you derive an advertising fee each time that a reader clicks on your ad.
Being an Author – write an electronic book (an ebook) on a topic that you know about from your life experiences. You don’t have to be a Hemingway; just tell it like you know it on a topic of your passion. You can list your new book on one of the online services, such as www.clickbank.com and then sit back and watch your bank account grow!
These are only a few of the hundreds of ways to build an internet ‘Cash Machine’ to shore up your financial house. It doesn’t matter where you are in life, either. If you are young, this can be a great source of primary income, if you are trying to build a bigger retirement nest egg, you can just direct the income stream into your Savings and not effect your household budget at all. But, if you get it going and get hooked as I have, you can join me in early retirement very soon!
Resources
Don Seibert is a retired business executive who, as an Expert Author, writes timely articles, books, and blogs on issues concerning early Retirement. Having retired twice, Don is host of http://www.RetireToEasyStreet.com – Visit the site for a complete discussion of Retirement Income Options