Feed on
Posts
Comments

Retirement Investing - Retirement Jobs - Getting Your Dream Retirement Job - Part 1

November 6th, 2006 by Papabear

Some people are really lucky. They retire and get to spend their time doing something they love, maybe something they’ve always dreamed of doing, just waiting till retirement so they can do it. And they can even make money at it.

Is there some reason you can’t have a ‘retirement job’ like that?

Not really.

Admittedly, we can’t control everything. But we can usually control more than we actually do. One of the things we can control is the effort we put into making our dreams come true.

For example, I remember reading something once about the difference between dreaming of being an author and of being a writer. People who dream of being an author plan on writing once they have the time, but people who dream of being a writer actually write. They don’t wait for the time…they make it, and just wish they had more.

For many of us, retirement is a time where all our excuses hit a brick wall, particularly if those excuses are about starting our own business or otherwise working for ourselves. For many retirees, that brick wall stands there firm and strong even when we do finally have the time.

But retirement is actually a great time to take that final step. Sure, we may really need extra money, but we no longer have the excuse of not enough time. All we have to do is face the truth. The truth being that many of us are actually scared to death to take that final step.

Tomorrow we’ll talk about some of the excuses people give for not taking that last step, and what we can do to overcome those excuses.

    • Posted in Retirement Investing | No Comments »

    Retirement Investing - Taking It One Day At A Time

    October 21st, 2006 by Papabear

    Yesterday I wrote about re-reading parts of Dale Carnegie’s book “How To Stop Worrying and Start Living”. In the first chapter he talks about the concept of living in “one-day compartments”. That made me thing of the Christy Lane song “One Day At A Time”? About 20 years ago it seemed like a commercial was on TV every 15 minutes selling that album.

    Dale Carnegie tells the story of a speech given by Dr. William Osler, founder of the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. Dr. Osler spoke to students at Yale on the secret of his success. He said he wasn’t smarter than the average person. Instead he said his success secret was to live in “day-tight compartments”.

    Dr. Osler told how he had taken an ocean voyage back in the days of the great Atlantic steamships. The ship’s captain took Dr. Osler to the bridge of the ship and showed him how, with the pull of a single lever, he could activate machinery to close doors throughout the ship and divide the ship into watertight compartments. This was a great advance in making ocean voyages safer.

    Dr. Osler urged his audience to take control of the machinery of their low lives and to divide their lives into “day-tight compartments” for the voyage through life. He said to seal off the dead past with its mistakes, and to seal off, for now, the future also, because the only time we can control is today.

    Dr. Osler didn’t say not to prepare for the future. He said that the best possible way to prepare for the future was to concentrate on making today as productive and meaningful as possible.

    That’s great advice for retirement planning and life in general. It works for retirement planning if you have 30 years left before retirement. It also works if you’re already retired. We need to make today the best day we can. We can’t change the past, and we can’t act in the future until we get there. Whether it’s retirement planning or any plans for the future, we can only act today to make tomorrow better. Like it says in the song, let’s resolve to live “One Day at a Time”.

    • Posted in Retirement Investing | No Comments »

    Retirement Investing - What Would Jesus Do?

    October 20th, 2006 by Papabear

    This blog seems to have taken off in a direction of its own. It wasn’t my original plan to devote so much space only to how-to financial issues. I meant to write a post on the subject of retirement planning and the steps for determining how much you need to save in your retirement savings account to fund the retirement lifestyle you want. When I typed up that little piece of advice, even covering the steps briefly, I realized it had grown into over 1,500 words of advice. Because it got so long, I divided it into 3 parts.

    So before this blog begins to sound like a dry financial planning textbook, let’s talk about some related things. What about retirement planning and planning for the future in general?

    In the Sermon on the Mount in the Kings James version so many of us are familiar with, Jesus says:

    “Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself.” (Matt. 6:25)

    When most of us hear these words, we understand them to mean Jesus was saying you don’t have to plan ahead. I even heard a man once who was bragging that he didn’t have any life insurance, and he justified it based on this Bible verse. That might be fine for him. He wouldn’t be around to suffer the consequences, but what about his survivors?

    I got out my copy of Dale Carnegie’s great book “How to Stop Worrying and Start Living” because I remembered he discussed this. Dale Carnegie says that when the KJV was written 400 years ago, “thought” frequently meant “anxiety”. So the verse is really better translated “have no anxiety for tomorrow” or “don’t worry about tomorrow”.

    The New International Version puts it this way in :

    “Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life…Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life?” Matt. 6:25-27

    What does this mean for retirement planning? Dale Carnegie says, by all means yes, you should think about tomorrow and do some careful planning and preparation. What Jesus was saying was - don’t spend your time worrying about tomorrow.

    Planning is productive, both retirement planning and other planning for the future. Worrying is not. That was great advice 2,000 years ago. It’s still great advice today.

    • Posted in Retirement Investing | 1 Comment »