How long do you want to continue working?

Frankly, I’d like to stop work­ing today.

Let me be clear. I’d like to con­tin­ue work­ing, I’d just pre­fer not to have to work.

Unfortunately, trends aren’t in my favor. Or yours, if you think like me.

Americans are work­ing longer, retir­ing lat­er. It kin­da sucks because 20 years ago we made sac­ri­fices so that we could retire, and now we’re not.

At least skim the arti­cle. There are some inter­est­ing sta­tis­tics. I’m not big on fear as a long term moti­va­tor, but it’s pret­ty inter­est­ing. Especially the parts that point to a declin­ing abil­i­ty to gen­er­ate income from your retire­ment sav­ings.

Guessing the future

Trying to fig­ure out how to draw down your retire­ment sav­ings and decide how much mon­ey you can spent in retire­ment is based on a guess.

How long are you going to live?

Well, how long are you going to live?

Yeah, I don’t know either.

Starting a small business, not building an investment portfolio

Your deci­sion about how much mon­ey to spend in retire­ment is about your per­spec­tive. It’s not a draw­down on your sav­ings but a pay­check from a side busi­ness.

Imagine start­ing a busi­ness that you hope will gen­er­ate income on the side. You’re not going to sell bits and pieces of the busi­ness to get that income. You’re going to gen­er­ate income from your busi­ness. Pull out that pay­check and improve your qual­i­ty of life, with­out weak­en­ing your busi­ness’ abil­i­ty to keep pay­ing you in the future.

That’s how you need to approach invest­ing.

Invest in com­pa­nies that pay you to own them. In fact, pick com­pa­nies that give you rais­es every year. This makes sure that your pay­checks beat infla­tion year-after-year in retire­ment.

Reinvest those div­i­dends until you need the pay­check. These rein­vest­ments give you addi­tion­al rais­es each-and-every quar­ter.

Then when it comes time to retire, or just slow down, you’ve got anoth­er income stream just as if you start­ed a com­pa­ny on the side (with­out the headache of run­ning an actu­al com­pa­ny).

Want more details? Check out my book or take my free email course.