Early Retirement Planning – How to Make it Happen

Financial Growth

When you say early retirement, most people think of retiring by age 50 or 55. Some who are more aggressive may even think about doing it by age 45. But what we’re talking about here is very early retirement. That means retiring by age 35, or 30 – or even sooner.

People actually do this kind of thing all the time, but admittedly it’s not common – and it‘s not easy. Let’s face it, if you try to retire early using conventional methods, you’ll never make it. 10 or 15 years isn’t nearly enough time to accumulate a company pension, or even to build up a large retirement portfolio (at least not in the way that most people like to fund them).

To create a very early retirement, you have to think outside-the-box. Here are three ways to do that, and any one of them may enable you to retire at a ridiculously early age.

Oh, and don’t worry if you already past 30. You can use these ideas to create a short time horizon retirement at virtually any age. So if you are already 50, but you’d like to retire at 60, these strategies are actually very doable within a 10 year time period at any age.

Create, Build, and Sell Your Own Business

This is probably the most efficient way to create an early retirement for yourself – or any type of big time financial success at all. Just ask Mark Zuckerberg!

It’s probably the single best way to amass a large retirement portfolio when you have very little money up front. If you have a good business concept, you can start the business on a shoestring, and grow it into a multimillion dollar enterprise. Once it reaches that size, you can sell it for a seven-figure settlement, then retire for the rest of your life.

No, this isn’t easy. And yes, it will require a lot of creative thinking. You have to find ways to raise capital, even though you don’t have any yourself. You’ll also have to leverage talent by partnering with those who have the skills that you don’t. You also have to be a killer salesperson. That means, more than anything, that you have to have the capability to promote your business in a way that will enable it to grow quickly.

And one more thing…You have to be fully committed to the business. That means that while everyone else is out getting married, having children, settling in suburbia, and partying and having a good time, you will be married to your business. That might mean spending close to every waking hour of your life working on your business in some capacity.

Develop Passive Income Streams

Related Topic: Why you might consider setting up a gold IRA

We can probably think of this as building a series of small business ventures, rather than one giant enterprise. This kind of strategy might even represent the very definition of a true entrepreneur. We can say this because it means that you will have the ability to create income sources out of something close to nothing. That’s a talent all by itself, and one that once developed, can literally create financial freedom out of thin air.

So what do we mean by passive income streams?

Essentially, any kind of income source that, once established, requires little or no activity on your part. You are effectively developing small cash streams from multiple sources.

There are different ways to do this. If you have a decent sized capital base to start, you could invest in rental real estate. If you are able to buy the properties on the cheap, and rent them for more than enough money to cover the expense of maintaining the property, the net income will be a fairly passive income source.

Even more efficient, is to develop passive income sources that do not require a lot of capital up front. As an example, selling a product through affiliates is one way to do this. You create the product, then pay other people or businesses to sell it for you.

As an example, let’s say that you create a winning investment program, that you sell for $300 a piece. The package itself is a digital product, which means that you have virtually no cost in reproducing the product. You pay your affiliate dealers $150 per sale, which makes them more than willing to promote your product.

Each time a sale is made, you pocket $150, and you didn’t have to produce anything, or even market the product. The entire process works on automatic pilot. If you have 100 affiliate dealers, selling one package each per month, you would earn $15,000 per month, without having to do a thing.

Again, this isn’t easy to do. But if you can, you will have created a cash machine for yourself. Then you can retire soon as the income reaches a level you feel comfortable with.

Save Until It Hurts

When saving for retirement, most people save an amount they’re comfortable with. By “comfortable”, I mean a percentage of their income that does not substantially interfere with their overall lifestyle. That might mean saving 10%,15%, or even just 5% of their income for retirement.

But let’s say that you are high income, and you can live on close to nothing. You earn say, $100,000 per year, and you can save $60,000 of it each year. You invest it all in index funds based on the S&P 500.

In ten years of aggressive savings, you will accumulate a portfolio of $1,007,288. If you can live on the safe withdrawal rate of 4% per year you will have a little bit more than $40,000 per year in retirement income.

That equals the amount of money that you have available from your salary, after saving 60% of your income. And that should enable you to retire, based on your past history of living beneath your means.

If you start doing that when you’re 25 years old, by a time you’re 35 you’ll be cashing out of the system for good.

Conclusion

There are different ways to retire at a very early age. They won’t be easy, but they are doable. You’ll just have to be willing to commit all of your resources to the effort. If you can, you’ll be richly rewarded for your trouble.