Read This If You Can’t Possibly Save Enough for Retirement

It is relatively easy to save for retirement when you're still young. Five thousand dollars for a new baby grows to an amount that generates more than $ 100,000 a year in current dollars days if the money earns 12 percent annually and inflation runs at 3 percent.

NOTE The data are a bit vague, but small company stocks are likely to provide the best yields of about 12 to 13 percent for long periods of time. small company shares, however, very risky for shorter periods of time.

The other side of this is that it is difficult to save for retirement if you start thinking (and savings) at the end of their working years. If you are 60, have not started saving, and wants $ 25,000 a year in income from your retirement savings at age 65, you may need to contribute annually more than it earns.

Say you're in your 50s, or even a bit more. With college expenses of children, or perhaps a divorce, you have no money saved for retirement. What should you do? What can you do? This situation, however regrettable, do not have to be untenable. There are some things you can do.

Say No

One tactic is not to retreat, or at least not yet. After all, saving for retirement for the earnings of those savings can replace your salary and wages. If you do not stop working, it is not necessary to produce savings for retirement investments.
Note also that "no retreat" does not mean you need to keep the same job. If you've been selling computers in your life and you're sick of it, do something else. Get a job teaching at a community college. (Maybe you'll get summer vacation.) Join the Peace Corps and go to South America. Get a job in a nursery and help shape the future.

Give yourself breathing

A second tactic is to delay retirement, an extra year, which, of course, also reduces the number of years in retirement. Instead of working at the age of 62 or 65, for example, working until the age of 67 or 69, a few more years of contributions and compound interest income will make a surprising difference, and you will substantially increase the money they receive defined benefit pension plans. If you are paying a mortgage, maybe you can pay all that money in those extra years, too.

Redefine your sense of

A third unconventional tactics and decide that more is less is more and tune with art and philosophy of frugality. A good book on this subject is Your Money or Your Life by Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin (Viking Penguin, 1992). And if you decide to live with less, while you are still working, you end up saving much more in the years remaining to work.