Late Bloomer: Will You Have To Work Well Into Retirement Years?

Retirement is funny in a way, in that if you’re young, you don’t think about it, but you really should be. When you’re in your mid-40s, and you haven’t been thinking about it at all until that very moment, you start to panic and can’t stop wondering just how you’re going to manage to pull off retiring at 65.

Chances are, you’re not.

But working well into your 70s or even 80s might be in your future if you haven’t thought about some sort of retirement plan, saving money or rethinking your budget to at least start setting aside an emergency fund or somewhat of a nest egg sooner than later.

The statistics, really, don’t lie as reports have indicated that retiring at 65 and doing so comfortably just isn’t in the cards for about 40 percent of the population and that staggering number only reiterates that we’re either not preparing for retirement correctly or we’re not budgeting the income we have coming in every month to the point that we can allot more into a retirement account or merely save while we’re working.

Here’s issue number 1: you probably are at a deficit when you look at current expenses versus income, an issue that plagues more than half of Americans trying to save. The only way you’ll be able to keep money on a paycheck to paycheck basis (rather than living from paycheck to paycheck) is to cut expense so that you’re working with some profit center, which will allow you to pay yourself every month and thus set money aside.

Furthermore, you can also allot that profit toward setting up a retirement account and continuing to add to it or buy into a company 401K and start letting the free money roll in, and by that, your company most likely matches you dollar for dollar or, at the very least, puts up 50 percent of what you do on each paycheck.

Being relegated to working well past conventional retirement age doesn’t have to be in your future. Look, if you enjoy your job and you’re Brent Musberger and being a sports announcer when you’re 77 years old and decide at that point you want to retire then so be it.

This isn’t about deterring you from keeping a job you enjoy no matter what age you’re at, but rather being comfortable with calling it quits at a point when work no longer is appealing, but you’re forced to stay onboard due to poor financial planning for retirement.

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