I just read a short article about retirement in a recent issue of Forbes magazine. The author wasted no time getting to scare tactics about needing to focus on lengthening your career versus planning for retirement. That got me thinking about how the world of retirement has changed, so I decided to do some quick historical research.
In a broad look at retirement, I found that up until the early 1930’s, most people basically worked until they died! In 1935 Social Security came into existence to help elderly people maintain some standard of living. You could collect at 65 but the life expectancy then was 58! That sounded like a program designed to fund the government to me.
In the 1950’s, more and more companies started creating retirement programs for their employees – more about that later.
We are now in the 21st century, and for many years now all we hear is social security may go broke. They started a fix in 1983 when they changed the age to collect to 67 if you were born after 1959. I bet we see more of that in the future.
I happened on another article, “The End Of Retirement”. The author, Glen Hiemstra, says, “Now it appears that retirement will go the way of the dodo bird.” H maintains that the concept of retirement “was largely invented to move people out of the labor force so younger people could be accommodated.” He added that it seems likely that most 21st cssentury elders will not retire, but will have “some leisure”.
I don’t know about you, but I don’t think working from about 24 to 70+ sounds like fun to me, that’s almost 50 years! I’m not sure why we created the idea of retirement and I’m not sure what the reason is that this idea seems to be disappearing, but I have an idea about how to make sure you can retire in style.
The lesson I have learned is that if you sit back and wait for the government, your employer, or someone else to create a nice retirement for you, it’s a big mistake. It is time to take control of creating a plan to give you the passive income to fund whatever kind of retirement you want, and I firmly believe this does not have to start at 65 or 70!
Real Estate investing has created a very comfortable retirement for many of our clients and most have gained that freedom well before 65 or 70. It takes education in the investment process, a plan based upon your goals, and a group of trusted people to help you along the process. At Buckingham Investments we can get you started on this. Give us a call or check us out at buckinghaminvestments.com.
-Marty Stone
