Make Your Money Go
Further In Retirement
Almost everyone gets pressured with money at some point in their lives and retirees are no different. In fact, it may seem worse after you’ve retired to be faced with bills you can’t pay because your working days are over. Fortunately, there are ways to make your money go further in retirement and some of the recommendations here are good things to put into practice even if your current financial shortfall disappears. With prices seeming to be out of control, almost everyone can benefit from three simple steps that should be incorporated into a lifelong planning process.
You can make your money go further in retirement with a detailed budgeting process.
The most important step is to understand the extent of your problem by preparing a budget that includes all of your income and all of your expenses. You need to have a very good understanding of where you spent your money over the past year. If you want to make your money go further, you have to first determine where it went! Keep track of every dollar you spend for at least a month and start to lay out a timeline that shows how much money you spend each month throughout the year. This budgeting process is critical and will be extremely helpful in anticipating coming problems. It will help you save toward that coming tax bill rather than being surprised by it. By recording your expenses, you’ll be able to prepare and save for things that are coming up in the future like car repairs or home maintenance. After you’ve gotten a good picture of your expenses, do the same for your income. Do it month by month and compare your income to your expenses over the course of the year. You’ll be able to quantify your problem and understand whether your shortfall was caused by a one-time event (like buying a car) or if it’s an ongoing problem that needs to be addressed. With the rising costs of everyday items, many people have seen their income fall short of covering their expenses and have made up that difference by reaching into their savings. You need to come up with a strategy to avoid that practice if you can. This brings us to the next step which can make a huge difference if you make it an ongoing practice.
The vast majority of people (and maybe retirees most of all) spend more money than they have to. To avoid this as much as possible, the next step is to take all of your hard work that you did recording each of your expenses and then analyzing them to see if any of those expenses can be reduced. I can almost guarantee that the answer is yes and that you’ll be very surprised at how you can make your money go further by eliminating those things you really don’t need and researching those things that you do need to see if you’re getting the best rate available. In terms of eliminating bills, subscriptions that renew automatically were one of our biggest offenders. When we reviewed all of the subscriptions we had, we realized we could save a lot of money by getting rid of the things we didn’t really need. This was especially true with our cable bill. When we moved into our home, we got a great introductory offer that gave us some “free” channels that turned into an ongoing expense a year later. There were loads of channels we had never even watched. The same was true with some magazines and museum memberships that we were just not reading or using when we had signed up years ago. We realized we could make our money go further just by eliminating some things we didn’t need.
As part of this process, every bill should be examined and researched to see if there are better rates out there. This includes insurance like policies that you have on your car and home. The internet is a great resource to find lower rates and prices on all kinds of things. On car insurance we actually didn’t even have to change companies because we got a lower rate just by calling up and telling them we were going to cancel because we had found better coverage for less. Amazingly, we got the same offer from them and didn’t have to go through the hassle of changing companies. It’s unbelievable what can happen if you just ask. If you want to make your money go further in retirement, you need to safeguard what you spend. This process can save you hundreds of dollars and it’s similar to the next step in the process.
One of the best practices you can follow is to plan your spending and food bills are one of the best areas to do this with. Always shop for sales. We have three grocery stores near us and get a flyer from each with the sales for the coming week. The prices we see determine what we’ll be eating in the coming week and it’s surprising how much money you can save by doing this. We love to eat out but if you make cooking at home fun and a way to see how much money you can save, it makes it easier to forego the luxury of fine dining. We have a great time trying to duplicate some of favorite restaurant dishes and, when we find something on sale, our cookbooks come out immediately to see what recipes would be good to try. And, when we do eat out, we’re always taking advantage of an early bird special if possible. There are ways to make your money go further with just a little extra planning.
Of course, one of the ways to make your money go further is to create a way to have a little more money coming in. Before you go out and get a job, however, I would challenge you to create extra income by starting a business if you can. More retirees are starting businesses than ever, and a few have started by selling things on e-Bay or other sites like it. Most people have a lot of “stuff” that they’ve collected over the years and, believe it or not, some of those things have more value than they think. While it’s true that most of it would sell for pennies on the dollar at a garage sale or flea market, some of those same things, can sell for a good deal more on the internet which gives the average person a global marketplace to find a collector who will pay a surprising amount to add something to their own collection. And, if selling things on the internet doesn’t excite you, don’t eliminate having a website as something that can add to your income. Websites were made for retirees. It’s a great way to add a new skill to your repertoire and you can have a lot of fun if you do something that you really have an interest in. You don’t need technical skills to get a website up and running. Just look at some of the case studies of people just like you who have created a successful business. The results speak for themselves. Bringing in extra cash every month may be the best way of all to make your money go further in retirement so why not at least look into it? Having your own successful business might be one more way to Enjoy Retired Life!
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