Retire early knowing you've got it made

By Ginger Applegarth

Take this job and …

Everyone, at one point or another, has had this thought. If you're working to support yourself, you've undoubtedly daydreamed about early retirement. This vision may come to mind once a year, once a week, or once an hour, depending upon how you feel about your job and career.

The thought of early retirement has always been tempting for workers, but it's all the more tempting now that our view of retirement has changed from a few decades ago. We no longer see retirement as a time when our productive life is over, when we spend our remaining years reminiscing about the past. Now, retirement is viewed as the time when we finally get to enjoy all the things we would love to do, if only we didn't have to work.

The problem with early retirement is that it's often so appealing that it becomes easy to make the decision before you really consider the ramifications. And if you do leap before you look, you may be leaping to an early financial death.

Will you run out of money?

Many experts estimate that a huge percentage of future retirees will have to cut their expenses dramatically once they stop working if they want to make sure they don't go broke. The real answer to the question, "Can I retire early?" is: "Of course you can, but you may run out of money."If that happens, the best scenario would be running out of money while you were still able to work, but chances are you would get a mediocre job at best. The worst circumstance would be going broke when you're no longer able to work, so your only options are to live on whatever monthly benefits you have (such as Social Security and a pension) or to turn to your children or other relatives for help.

When thinking about retiring early, there are two issues to consider:

• Can I afford to retire early?
• Do I really want to retire early?

Depending on how well your day went at work today, or how your career is progressing in general, you might think the second question is absurd. But if you look at how long you will be retired, you might want to rethink that second question.

The reality is that if you retire early, you may be "retired" for as long as you were in the working world. Based on actuarial tables of how long Americans actually live, if you retire at age 55, you can expect to live to age 83. If you retire at 65, you get another year's reprieve to age 84. And if you keep working until age 70, you're expected to live to age 86. Couple that with the fact that if you're married, one of you is likely to outlive the other by four to six years or longer, and you can see how early retirement requires serious financial planning.

Plan for how long you expect to live

To be practical and conservative in your financial planning, you should probably tack three or four more years onto these "average" death ages. If your relatives tend to live into their 90s, you had better add on a few more years. You also could try our Life Expectancy Calculator to get a better idea of your longevity.

Some of those later years may not be as active as the early ones, but they will be just as expensive thanks to medical costs. The only good news about living to 100 is that if you own a life insurance policy, you're usually considered actuarially dead by that time. That means you'll get the full death benefit while you're still alive and kicking (although you might not be kicking very high).

If you assume you'll enjoy at least an average life span, taking early retirement at age 55 or 60 means you have 30 years or so of retirement ahead of you. That's a long time without a paycheck or a structured schedule.

Now, don't think I'm trying to talk you out of your dreams. I'm not. What I am trying to get you to do is to think about what it will take and what it will mean.

Before you allow yourself the luxury of daydreaming about what you would do with all those years of free time, look at the numbers first and see whether you can afford to retire early.

Continued: Inflation is your enemy

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