When I tell people that their retirement income target may not be as high as they thought, a common response is, “Yeah, well what about long-term care?” Everyone has an anecdote, perhaps involving an aunt or the parent of a friend, who needed extensive, round-the-clock care at the end of their lives and ended up burning through half a million dollars or more. If we take a closer look at…
For many of us, retirement is a far off dream. It’s already difficult enough to pay our current bills on time, and we aren’t able to contribute to our retirement funds as much as we’d like. But early retirement is a real possibility if you work for it in your 20s and 30s. Here are a few alternative paths to early retirement: Cut expenses. Many financial planners recommend that you…
Have you thought about how much income you need after retirement? If you have, chances are you tried one of these online retirement calculators such as the AARP’s retirement calculator. I used my old salary and it estimated that I would need at least $6,340,998 to retire at 40. (Mrs. RB40 retires at 60.)Unfortunately, I must confess that we haven’t reached that goal yet. Try it out and share your…
Ming and Li are exceptional savers. They have already paid for their $300,000 home in southwestern Ontario and saved nearly $330,000, without any help from parents since they graduated. They have built a solid financial base for themselves and their two young children. Now the 37-year-old software developer and 34-year-old consumer research analyst wonder whether socking away a further $50,000 a year from their $163,000 income would put them in…
When trying to figure out how much you need to retire, there are many different rules of thumb you could follow. While I’ve previously discussed the 4% rule and the rule of 20, which both calculate your likely income at retirement, the most common calculation on how much to save up to retirement may be the 10% rule. The 10% rule simply states that you should save 10% of your…
One of the major tricks I learned when I was an I.T. dude, was how easy it was to fix problems if you told your customer, “Have you rebooted your system lately?”. I also knew this drove my customers nuts, but it worked most of the time, and they had to then go away, and I usually had a good chuckle. When I was at the Maundy Thursday service at…