thebahamasweekly.com - 4 Things You Can Do to Make Your Retirement a Disaster

From:TheBahamasWeekly.com

Investing in You - Glenn S. Ferguson
4 Things You Can Do to Make Your Retirement a Disaster – Guaranteed!
By Glenn S. Ferguson
May 17, 2011 - 8:36:08 AM

If you really want to be sick and tired; old and broke; unhappy and miserable in your golden years then here are four things you can do to make your retirement a disaster – Guaranteed!

1. Do Not Think About Your Retirement Now

The first thing that you need to do to ensure your retirement disaster is not to think about retirement now. That’s right! Do not bother yourself with this sort stuff now.

You are just too young for that. Just wait until you are in your late 50’s and then begin to think about retirement. By this time you would have lost as much time and money as possible and really old enough to start planning your retirement.

The good news for you is that this delay would put you comfortably in the company of the 80 percent of Bahamians who after working for 40 years and over 80,000 hours; at age 65 will have to:-

continue working and
be dependent on the government, their family or charity for support

All because they would have failed to plan for their retirement. If this is the company you would like to keep then continue to be too busy living to think about your retirement planning now.

2. Do Not Start Saving Now

With all the struggles of life why bother to save. It is difficult enough making ends meet with the little salary “these people paying you anyway.”

So just continue to live for today and let tomorrow take care of itself. Who knows what tomorrow will bring anyway...

Do not worry about budgeting or controlling your expenses and debt. Just make sure everyone else is getting your hard earn money so that and none is left for you.

No money saved means no money invested which equals no money compounding which equals no money for your retirement.

3. Do Not Start to Invest Now

You have heard ‘the early bird gets the worm.’ Well this is also true about investing to build your retirement nest egg. That is why you do not want to behave like the ‘early bird’- because nothing influences your investment like starting early.

Consider this:

Investor A started at age 25 investing $5,000 a year (about $100 a week) for 10 years at a return of 11% and stops when he is 35. He does not add or withdraw any money but leaves the account alone. At age 65 his investment would result in him having accumulated $787,176.00.
Investor B stalls - did not start until age 35 and he too invests $5,000 a year for 10 years at 11% and stops when he is 45. At age 65 his investments would have accumulated to $364,615.00

Although they both saved the same amount of money $50,000.00, Investor A has accumulated $422,567 more than investor B. But what you want to do is to delay as long as possible so let us consider another option.

3. Investor C stalled longer - he starts at 45 and invested $5,000 a year for 10 years at 11% and stops at 55.

Here again he has invested the same $50,000.00 as Investor A but Investor A has $618,289 more than investor C.

Starting at 45 is not possible for you because the kids are in school and you need the money for their tuition and other living expenses so you will just wait until age 55. In this case Investor A will have $703,949 more accumulated in his account than you.

By starting to invest now you give yourself the greatest change of accumulating the most funds possible for your retirement. But in order to make your retirement a disaster you do not want to start investing now.

4. Do Not Be Concerned About Your Physical Health Now

Finally you want to make sure that you are as unfit as possible.

Do not worry yourself about your weight or getting your blood pressure and cholesterol checked.
Do not bother to exercise.
Eat and indulge yourself with all the junk and fast foods you can,
while ignoring how much trans-fatty acids, sugar, salt, nicotine and alcohol you consume each day.

Go ahead do all that you can do during this first half of your life to shorten the second half of your life.

Ensure that you get all of the lifestyle diseases that can easily be prevented by nutrition, exercise and a little adjustment now to your lifestyle. Diseases like:-

Diabetes
High Blood Pressure
High Cholesterol and
Obesity.

These will all help you to be in the poorest health possible and will greatly diminishing the quality of life you will have in retirement.

And if you are like 80 percent of Bahamian you are right on tract because you are not thinking about retirement, you are not saving and investing and you are not taking care of your physical health.

So you do not have to change anything. Just keep on doing what you are doing and you make your retirement a disaster – Guaranteed!

But if you want to change all this and Rescue Your Retirement and be in that small group of Bahamians that will actually be enjoying retirement then you want to get the FREE REPORT - “Retirement’s Dirty Little Secrets and Lies.. And What You Can Do About Them.”

“It's time to start living the life you've imagined”- Henry James

Copyright © 2011 - Glenn S. Ferguson

Glenn Ferguson is a Retirement and Financial Consultant, Speaker, Coach and Syndicated Writer, helping you to painlessly take control of money so that you can own your pay cheque again to create wealth for you and your family. Email to: glen@investinginyou.org Tel: 242-327-2453 Fax: 242-327-2456 Website: www.financialcoachingwithglenn.com