Re-tired Planning: How To Start Saving For Retirement After 40

At what age did you start planning for your retirement? If you waited a little longer to start saving or you reach the magic number of 40, and you’re either far behind where you want to be or haven’t started at all, it’s easy to assume that you’ll have to work until you're in your 70s before you can actually quit working. That doesn’t have to be the case, particularly for those who are 40 and have little to no retirement planning that has been accomplished for a good part of your career. Whatever the reason is why you haven’t started retirement planning can’t hold you back from picking that day and getting moving. How can you start saving at 40 for retirement? Is it really too late? The answer to the latter question is absolutely not, but as far as saving at 40, you aren’t out of the picture by any means. You can start by tapping into that company retirement plan now but do so without your eyes closed. By that, you need to think about what that retirement number truly is and then adjust how much you’re setting aside accordingly. You can start saving over and above what that number would be if the retirement planning started 10 or 15 years earlier. One element of retirement savings that often is overlooked and becomes extremely important when talking about calling it quits is the current amount of debt you have in your life. The thought might be to increase your retirement contributions so much that you tend to forget about the task at hand, and that’s paying off your debt. Those monthly payments, your debt, aren’t going away after you retire so you should focus on taking on that larger scale debt as far as interest rates are concerned. In conjunction with that, you should minimize spending on this short term retirement plan and start thinking about living a little below your means, and eliminating cost ineffective items or expenses such as cable television, cell phone plans, clothing and vacations. This isn’t to suggest that you can’t have a new shirt for the next 20 years or so never touch toe to sand again, but you should mitigate meals out or the number of times you go away, thus getting you closer to retirement even though you got such a late start on it.