How Much Money Do You Need to Retire?

• Author: Bryan Miller
• Posted: 2024-08-13

For the average person out there, things like savings, personal investing and working a better career start to become much larger concerns as they age. When most people are in their teens and twenties, they don't think too much about the future. Though as they start to have families and start to get older, they're constantly pondering their futures and wondering if they're going to be comfortable enough to retire. Speaking of retirement, how much money are you going to need to actually leave the workforce and spend those golden years in peace? Decades ago in America, a person could work a basic labor job and retire in their late 50s, typically with their home paid off and enough savings to get them through. In today's America, however, it's a blended mosh-pit of 350-million people, trillions of dollars in debt, and over 100-million on government benefits full time. So what you will need to retire in the future of your lifetime is vastly different than your grandparents' retirement.

This is why a lot of economic experts suggest that you should be leaning more heavily on personal investments. Saving money is always a great thing, to be sure, but as the world has witnessed over just the past two years, the state of a government's currency is always in a state of flux. In fact, speaking of America in particular, the US Dollar is quite literally only worth 5% of its value compared to 1950. Just imagine in 20, 30 or more years when you retire. If you do manage to save a lot of money, how much will it even be worth? With personal investing and diversifying your assets, however, you might not suffer that sort of fate. Your investments might be protected against any sort of inflation or devaluation.

Investing in Appreciable Assets

Investing in things that appreciate in value is one of the best ways to guard against any sort of future collapse of the Dollar. It's very important to consider things like precious metals. Take gold, for example. The value of gold is entirely separate of the value of the US Dollar. The fact is that as the Dollar weakens, gold just increases in value. This is specifically because the Federal Reserve just prints new money, or even creates it digitally, any time that they want to flood the American economy with money. Gold, on the other hand, is a much rarer commodity that must be physically mined out of the ground. This makes it more solid in terms of value. The principles of supply and demand are thrown out of whack when money can just be printed. Gold cannot be printed, and so the supply is always going to fall short of its demand. This makes it an ideal personal investment in your future, even more so than digital currencies, which are definitely hit or miss now that there are so many of them.

No Avoiding Inflation (COL)

No matter what you invest in, you're never going to be able to avoid inflation. Again, this is why precious metals are such a good investment for your future. Think about the inflation rates right now, and what the Dollar is worth compared to 70 years ago. Now think about what this will be like 20 years down the road. Imagine that gold is $2,000 per ounce, but that $2,000 in 20 years is only worth about $500 today. That is a very real possibility. The thing here, however, is that the gold itself will always just be flatly worth the $2,000 as long as its value holds. It isn't until you use it as actual currency that its value is affected by inflation. To explain this in simpler terms, it's ideal to sit on your gold and to trade it instead of cashing it out. That's how you avoid the inflation as best you can.

You May Have to Work Longer

Millions of people are terrified that they will have to work until they die. They walk into Walmart and they see people who are literally 80 years old still working there. This is a sad reality, but the fact is that most of these seniors in the workforce never put any thought into investing personally in their futures, or they couldn't afford to.

All this means is that you need to really figure out how to carve out some money to invest in your future.