How to Retire Early and Enjoy the Life You Want

Many individuals are discovering that working your whole life only to enjoy retirement when you have one foot in the grave is not the way to live. Embracing early retirement is the new American dream, and who can argue with enjoying the good things of this life, such as travel, in your best years? Retiring young can be a reality for you, and this is how.

Start with a Plan

All great adventures in life start with a good road map. Your financial adventure is no different. Most people are going to go through the daily motions of going to work, wasting their paycheck, and saving too little for retirement. They will have barely enough for retirement when they reach 65-70. You don?t want to live like the norm, so that means you have to make crazy and drastic plans now so that you can live a crazy and drastic retirement many years before the norm.

To best formulate your plan, you need to figure out these three things:

• How much money do you need for basic living?
• When do you wish to retire?
• What luxury desires do you wish to fulfill in your retirement?

Answering these three questions will give you the solid answer on how much money you need to save and how many years you have to accomplish this. Once you calculate how much you need, you may be surprised at how big the numbers are. This is where the second part of planning comes in. Now you have to put your lofty financial goals into realistic action steps.

You will want to figure out the following:

• How to drastically increase your cash flow
• How to drastically decrease your living costs
• Where to invest now for the greatest return
• How to increase assets in semi-retirement
• How to start increasing your passive income for later use

Increasing Your Passive Income

The best way to enter retirement early is to still have money making resources on the side. During your career years, invest in passive income venues that will benefit your ?paycheck? comes to an end. This can be through real estate investments, business investments, or paper investments. These investments will keep the cash flowing in with very little effort on your part in your early retirement years.

Ideally, you want to live on your saved money and passive income while still investing in your 401K or IRA. You don?t want to tap into your actual retirement accounts until you are the normal retirement age to save yourself from unnecessary fees and taxes.

Saving Like No One Else

Accumulating a good chunk of money for your early retirement is going to take drastic savings. You cannot expect to keep up with the Jones while trying to build substantial wealth on your existing income. Think about the drastic things can you and your family do to reach your goals? It is going to take a whole lot more than just cutting the cable and saying no to the newest tech candy Apple puts out.

You will have to think bigger when it comes to your savings, such as selling your cars and buying a used one for less than $5K and maintaining it yourself. Another crazy way to save a lot of money is to downsize your home. Who says that every child needs their own bedroom? If you own your home, you can either sell it for a profit and buy a home half the size and half the cost, and invest the rest. You can also keep your home and rent it out while living in a smaller and cheaper apartment or home. This will allow you to pay off your home faster and it gets you started with passive income.

Investing in Your Financial Knowledge

One thing you need to invest in now is your financial knowledge. There are a lot of get rich schemes out there and financial courses that boast a big return but only end up robbing you. If you are going to live off of your investments, then you need to know the ins and outs of your portfolio. When it comes to investing, not knowing enough can end up costing you.

No one will care about your wealth as much as you do. So while hiring a financial adviser is a smart decision, you shouldn?t trust him blindly. You need to be active in every step of building your wealth.

Retiring in Your 30s ? Is It Even Possible?

While retiring in your thirties is not very common, many individuals are making it a reality. The bloggers behind the site, Madfientist.com and Earlyretirementextreme.com, are both living examples. They both have retired in their early thirties and not because they had crazy six-figure careers.

Instead, both of them made average salaries and saved about 70% of their paycheck each month. For Mad Fientist, as the blogger calls himself, his goal for early retirement was to get out of the rat race and have the freedom to travel more. While he saved enough to leave his full-time job whenever he wanted, he still plans to work part-time on his own projects in computer software and maintaining his blog.

With the rest of his time, he plans on writing music, learning new languages while traveling, and spending more time with loved ones and doing volunteer work.

Is Early Retirement for You?

A common theme amongst many young retirees is that they just want extra time to pursue their own passions and projects. For some people, early retirement might mean sitting on the beach with a drink in hand for the rest of their life. For most people, though, early retirement means more time to really live the way they want to without being chained down by a standard job or financial worries.