Retirement Plans

[The Stig]

How is your retirement plan?

This is an important question.

First, you need income to live post retirement. If you don't set aside money for that now, you won't be able to do that very easily. Further, are you incorporating money into your retirement income stream to continue prepping after retirement?

Catastrophic meltdown might not happen before you aren't able to work full time anymore....are you prepping for that eventuality?

Probably not the sexiest prep topic but one that should be considered.

[bacpacker]

Good idea that I bet a lot of folks aren't giving a lot of thought to. For me, I'm struggling to try to get to the point of being able to retire one day.

[Fatty]

This has me torn big time. I've been investing 10% into my 401k with a company matching 60 cents on every dollar up to 6%. But I'm worried of getting bit in the behind if they ever try to socialize 401k's. That part scares me the most about my retirement plans. I assume my pension won't be there by the time comes and on top of that, I highly doubt anyone around my age (30) will ever be able to retire at the rate this FED is going. But everytime I ask myself "why even save for retirement if you don't plan on being able to? I always say "its just like Christ- it would suck a whole lot worse if I was wrong

[Sniper-T]

I am diligently trying to get a third job for my wife. If I can pull that off, I can retire comfortably tomorrow. If any large ticket items are required, she can do some overtime.

Wanna guess how well this has been going over?

lol.

buying gold/silver/ammo/ and anything else that can be turned to liquid cash. My company pays 1:1 for our investments, which may or may not endure.

and I just try to have all my ducks in a row. Have all my storage preps set up, the gardens, tools, toys, etc.

Minimize as much of the post retirement costs as possible, pre-retirement!

[Onestep]

This has been our focus now as we are both near an age we "could" retire IF we have enough to sustain, which we never feel we do.
We have been putting as much as we can into our 401k's but as Fatty mentioned, I do worry about those being pillaged by the govt..
Because of that we are trying build up our savings as well in cash. We have our preps in pretty good order including some PM's but I kow once you pull the retirement switch, things will need to be cut way back.

[realist]

First I highly recommend retirement, it is better than the brochure. I have one kid in college and one in a private high school. I work part time so that I can afford this. I have found that I pay that same taxes on my 401k draws as the rest of my income. I figure that we will pay about the same amount of money in taxes as my wife makes. She has one more year to work before she can retire. If they cut her salary due to budget cuts this year it will be sooner. Put away what you can. Remember some of those things that you are putting away are going up in value more than any money that is in the bank.

[Grumpy Old Man]

Retirement is over-rated and was an unknown concept until progressives started touting the concept. I will work until the day I die. I don't want to be like some of my friends and play cards or golf every day with the same folks, or worse yet, start the morning with a bloody mary and sip cocktails all day. It is so common out here that the practice is accepted as normal.

Rather, my idea of retirement is to have enough cash and assets, that I can subsistence farm and not need to make big expenditures on food etc. I want a place where I can do my own thing without HOAs, suburban zoning, nosey city folk complaining about manure smells and squawking chickens. To that end I am exploring a small acreage acquisition (less than 40 acres) in the northern tier of the Basin and Range geomorphic provence. The land is more affordable, comes with water rights (always important in semi-arid regions) and is a lot less densely populated than other places.

If I pull it off, I'll be able to quit drawing a paycheck in a couple of years and retire to the land to work at feeding myself and my livestock. My needs are few, tbh.

[realist]

Grumpy that is what I am doing. I was lucky to find a nice piece of land, bought it out of the paper on a Sunday morning, that I have been able to develop. It is far enough out for people to leave me alone. I have great neighbors who all mind their own business but still watch out for each other. I work to pay for my habits which include the building of a cabin this summer on a piece of property that we have in the middle of no where. I do not know about anyone else but I always like my job. After 33 years I can not remember a day that I did not want to go to work. I might not liked what happened that day but I still liked the work. It is for that reason that I still like to work part-time as well as teach on the side. The nice thing about retirement is you can pick and choose what you want to do. Tomorrow I am helping out teaching a high school class for fun. To me that is retirement.

[bacpacker]

More good points folks. I gave this topic a lot of thought today. If things continue to go downhill economically as it has for at least the last 5 years, in reality for much longer than that. At least since the 1960's IMO. The value of the dollar continues to decline, and has rapidly sped up the last 5-10 years to the point you are money ahead buying things you want to store now rather than 5 years from now. You'll end up with a lot more for your money. Food is somewhat of an exception unless your getting long term storage with a 20-30 year shelf life.
We still need to save for the future without a doubt, but and this is strictly my thoughts, I want to have as many of my preps purchased well before I retire if I get that chance. There are certain things that will probably wait till close to time for retirement, such as a power generation system solar, hydro, maybe wind. I feel like the price for all these will come down over time like tv's, dvd's, and computers. But other things such as food, tools, various types of gear, even older vehicles that would make a good BOV. a BOV for example such as a non electronic truck or SUV are getting harder to find, as are parts to rebuild or repair them. If you wait another 10-30 years depending on your age, this type vehicle may not be available at all.
This topic is a very personal thing to each of us as all our circumstances are different and we are at various point's in our life so there will be a wide variety of thoughts on this I'm sure.

[realist]

One thing about gold and silver is it stays with you. NO I am not trying to get you to buy or sell gold or silver. This is just an observation. I recently had to draw a bunch of money out of my retirement in order to do some major repairs on my house. They kept 20 percent for Federal taxes. After calming down I realized they should have kept at least 40%. Then there is my lovely state, they will want about 10% so that leaves me with 50%. Now I am trying to earn some more money so I will have it in April when taxes are due. So after all these years I now have to look at half of my retirement going to the government for taxes. Now think about this I have a friend that just sold several of gold coins for his mom. The value on the coins were about $1,500. These had been in his family for about 20 years. When he sold them his mom got $1,500 with no taxes taken out. So whatever she had into them they obviously held their value and were not further devalued by having taxes taken out. I should have put all my retirement that was for the long term in gold and silver just to keep my head above water.