I have a friend, who has hardly begun his career, but is already CRAZY about retiring. I think what he is really after, is to be financially independent, and gain more discretion over his time. And damn right he is, as time should absolutely be your most prized asset. I mean, I don’t see any of you snowflakes getting younger or prettier. The good news here is that the chap has got two thing right already; he is a doctor with his own practice. This means that he has pretty much maximised his ‘active income‘ potential.
To achieve his goal, under normal circumstances, he either has to wait until the government ‘allows’ him to retire, currently anything beween 60-67 in Europe, or take charge of his own destiny and get that ‘passive income’ flowing. To motivate him to ‘grab the bull by the horns’ I went out onto the world wide web and found this neat little retirement calculator. It looks at your current annual income, savings, expenses, savings rate, and finally your current portfolio value. Based on that it tells you when you are ready to retire financially. It also contains this absolutely essential advice which YOU MUST GET RIGHT if you want to get anywhere with this:
Compound interest is powerful but takes a long time. To retire in 5 or 10 years the most important number is not your return on investment. It’s your savings rate.
Capisce? Now go dust off those childhood piggy bank and start stashing away those G’s!
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Image by tookapic from Pixabay.