What's Your Exit Strategy?

Many forced into hard work in retirement

Labor: Investment losses, rising health care costs and longer lives are changing seniors' plans.

But, truth be told, retirement isn't what it used to be. Pensions, when available, are shrinking beside the swelling costs of making it through old age. Social Security doesn't add that much, and Medicare doesn't pay for drugs - the fastest-growing health care cost.

Savings, which could once be counted on to produce supplemental interest income, yield a fraction of the dollars they once provided. Mounting costs of living and educating children are causing significant numbers of Americans not to save for retirement at all.

So ... a growing army of retirees ... across the country are, of necessity, going back to work into their 70s and even 80s as security guards, cashiers, receptionists and bus drivers.

"They used to call work the poor man's pension; now it is going to be part of many, many people's retirement income stream," said Clare Hushbeck, senior legislative representative and labor economist at AARP. "People are being yanked back to reality in a fairly painful way. More and more people are going to have to be working in retirement."

[Baltimore Sun]

Many of the people I talk to about building their own business are looking for quick riches, or that's what they think I'm talking about. The truth is that building your own business, whether in network marketing or in more traditional business (if you can afford it) are simply ways of providing long-term, leveraged, residual income that will allow you to walk away from the world of work and have a life. The retirees interviewed in this article are able to keep on working. What about the people who lost their health in their 50's or 60's and for whom continuing to work is not an option? And every one of the people interviewed would have agreed with Sarah Hale, the first woman named in the article: "If I had enough money ... I certainly would know how to enjoy it."

Think long term for yourself, and encourage others to whom you speak about building a network marketing business or a traditional entrepreneurial business to do the same. Do it now, before "long-term" becomes "next week."

10:29:54 AM