When I work with people on planning for their retirement, a key question I ask is “How much do you want to live on in retirement?”. This is a really hard question to answer, especially if you are in your 20’s or 30’s. Afterall, what will the 60+ year old me enjoy doing in over 30 years time? We could be going on weekend breaks in Australia at that stage (If you haven’t seen the SpaceX video on this, click the link!). So it’s very hard to know how much money you will need at that stage in life.
When trying to estimate how much they need in retirement, people tend to think of their current net salary, less the mortgage and money spent on the kids; who they hope are no longer an expense at that stage. They then come up with a relatively small amount that they feel that they need in retirement.
I have a two kids who are now 10 and 7. Like all parents these days, we went through the years of having to pay for creche fees, which cost €1,000 a month per child. That’s a lot of money but we did it and we’re finished with it a few years now. When I look back at that time and how we afforded it, the answer is simple…we went without ourselves and didn’t do all the things we wanted to do. It was only when we stopped paying these fees and had more money in our bank account that we started going on weekend breaks etc more often.
It’s the same when it comes to retirement. You’ve spent decades paying a mortgage and paying the huge cost of raising kids that you have been going without and probably no longer realise it. it.
Take a bit of time to think about what you would like to do in retirement. There’s no more requests for annual leave, you can do whatever you want to do. When you’ve thought about that, go online and see how much it is going to cost you. Now we can start planning on how to make it all happen!!
Let me know what you would love to do in retirement and what is stopping you from doing it. You can drop me an email at steven@bluewaterfp.ie