The Road To Retirement
As with many things in life there are many different directions you can take to the same goal. I have read many blogs, books, and articles to find my path. To be honest all of their advice was not what I wanted or could do. Most offered a simple plan to retirement. Cut expenditures and start making your money do the work for you. They suggested evaluating your lifestyle and trimming the fat as it were. They suggested to not be a slave to the consumer economy. My problem is what if you don’t make much, and trimming the fat doesn’t net much at all. What if you can’t afford to save for retirement. That was my problem, and I didn’t see a way out, until now.
I did a lot of researching and a lot of reading. I read a book called I will teach you to be rich. The author was a hardliner he came up with an example where he called the two people Dum Dan and Smart Sally. You see Dumb Dan started saving for retirement at 35 where as Smart Sally started when she was 25. So basically he was saying that since I was 34 at the time I was dumb for not being able to plan for the future. I got angry and the sad because I have lived paycheck to paycheck and saving money was not really in the plan. Now I did and do have some fun expenses to be honest and they could be trimmed I am sure, but where is living then. If all you do is work and sleep and have little to no fun then why are you alive. So I thought there had to be a better way. That and I thought if I had to spend the rest of my life in my horrible job I would die inside anyway. So I looked else where I looked into any and every get rich scheme and every other thing under the sun then I found the answer. It wasn’t the full answer but it was a start of one. It was Affiliate Marketing. You see with Affiliate Marketing I could have my cake and eat it too. I could start generating revenue quit my job and work from home. On top of that if I did everything well I could let my websites pretty much be and just collect a paycheck. If I did it really right I could work hard on many sites and then have the life of my dreams. So that is my plan.
Affiliate Marketing doesn’t have to be your plan here is how to retire early if you want to stay with your job and if you like your job. The older you are the harder this is but it is doable. First trim the fat, then start putting money either in low risk to medium risk stocks, I highly suggest a good financial advisor for this (make sure they are a fiduciary). You can and should also invest in a Roth IRA they have a lot of stipulations but they are well worth it, if the fees are reasonable. If your yearly income is too high to start a Roth IRA I recently found out you can start a regular IRA then roll it into a Roth IRA (pretty neat huh). OK so what are IRAs? So a regular IRA is a Individual Retirement Account. A standard IRA has no tax on the amount you put in, but it gets taxed on the amount you take out. Both have a limit on how much you put in per year. At age 59.5 for a traditional IRA there are no penalty fees for withdrawl and distributions must be taken at age 70.5. As mentioned before a traditional IRA has no set income limit a Roth does. A Roth now is taxed on the money you put in, but has no tax on the money you take out or the distributions. With a Roth you can access it at any time penalty free as long as you only access your contributions after five years. With a Roth you can access your funds five years after without penalty or tax, the same holds true for after age 59.5. There is no upper requirement for distributions like a traditional IRA. If you are like me you probably are wondering can you open multiple IRAs, sadly no just one per person. So the retirement plan is to let your money sit and grow and hopefully by the time you want to retire you can. I was talking with a financial advisor and he told me if I had $600,000 dollars he could set it up so I wouldn’t have to work again. This seems very reasonable and most people who set out to retire early aim for one million then they retire and live off of the money the one million generates. This is a long road to retirement especially if you don’t make much.
My road to retirement is going to be different. First I am starting an online business once I make about three times what I make at work I will quit work. I will enjoy that. Then handle my online business like work, set aside hours to work and play. The great thing is I will be home and I can spend time with my lovely finance the whole time. Other perks are I won’t have to call in sick or beg my boss for a day off. There are down sides though you have to furnish your own health insurance, and you have to run things like a business. Now I have been trying Affiliate marketing for a long time on my own reading blogs and books and everything else you could imagine. I couldn’t make it on my own, that is not to say others cannot.
So I joined Wealthy Affiliate, and it has helped me so much. It has great programs to help you get started and stay motivated. The support from the creators and the community cannot be beat. Any question you have will be answered and people genuinely want to see you succeed. The best thing in my eyes is they have everything under one roof. They can host your sites and they are better then my other domain carrier so much so that I want to transfer all of my domains to their service since it is so much better and easier. They will help you set up your websites, they have streamlined the process so that most anyone can build a professional looking website. They also have a great keyword tool included. It is basically Jaxxy lite it doesn’t have all the bells and whistles, but is is very good nonetheless. Jaxxy was actually created by the creators of Wealthy Affiliate so it makes sense that they both show the same metrics. So to get Jaxxy pro as of this writing it is $19 a month, and web-hosting is normally going to run you over $10 a month. Wealthy Affiliate they cost $47 a month but it is true value for your money with the on point training and their amazing community.
After you start to make money affiliate marketing then you start rolling that money into other investments. One investment I want to make is into cheap property so I can make them rentals. You really have to look for places that have a low housing cost but decent rent, but when you find it they will pay for themselves and you can collect a good check every month. Also my plan is to see a financial advisor and get them working on growing my money. They take 10%, but that is a good thing it means they are motivated to make as much for you as possible doesn’t it. Sadly and not so sadly is if you have money it is easy to acquire more, if you don’t have money it is hard to get out of the bottom. That is why the Internet is so powerful for the first time in the history of humans it is easy and cheap to start your own business and to get out ahead. The great thing about this plan is you don’t have to sacrifice anything, but some extra time in the start. When you would be watching Netflix instead work on your business then one day you can quit your job and spend less time working and make more in the process. Now lets be honest though you have to work at it, like most things in life worth having you have to work for it, but if you keep at it and keep striving you will achieve, not might, but will. So start today if you don’t want to pay for a service then try Wealthy Affiliate for free. It cost nothing and they will give you two free websites that you can keep forever, and they have a free course on how to get started too. There is literally no risk to you at all, and with a free website you can start making money in no time.
Thank you so much for reading and I wish you the best success,
Rick
If you have any questions or comments please feel free to comment below.