Will We Go Broke During Retirement?

Our biggest fear during retirement is that we will run out of money. We have been putting money into a retirement savings plan for a long time , but with the unstable economy will we have enough to retire on for the next 20 or 30 years or longer?

Not just my husband and myself, but many baby boomers have seen their 401Ks hit hard the past ten years in our investment portfolio. Our real estate investments have been hit harder than anything. It is going to take at least another ten years for our previous real estate holdings to bounce back up to where they were.

We have been planning our retirement savings since we were in our twenties. We would like to continue to save in retirement if possible. If we can earn a retirement income and put 10% of our earned income as well as reinvesting at least 1/3 of our investment dividend earnings until our early or mid seventies we should not run out of money. Hopefully!

The hardest part for me anyways has been to learn to live within our means. Getting away from credit debts and using a more frugal approach has really cut our spending in the past year. This has really helped in being able to save more of what we earn versus spending on credit.

We definitely do not want to live in poverty to be able to retire so we have been putting a strong focus on continuing to earn and save during our retirement. We figure it will be a lot less painful to earn a second income and still live the life we want versus the alternative.

This is a big reason I am here on HubPages to see if we can earn a second retirement income making money on the internet.

We do not buy new cars anymore. Even with the great deals they have been having to push cars lately, we have been sticking to the rule not to buy a car less than 3 years old. We figure we can save at least 50% on a car by buying used. Plus we save the big loss on the first 2 years of depreciation.

We also have been buying a lot of second hand and clearance items. This has been a huge savings for us. Since we both work having decent looking clothes and looking decent is important. We have found some great second hand clothing stores that carry top of the line merchandise at a fraction of what we were spending buying off the rack new. We also do a lot of clearance shopping and buy end of the season clearance items. This has helped not only us but we are able to buy gifts a head of time at a huge savings.

As far as our food and disposable necessary spending we have learned the art of coupon shopping. I use a coupon website to assist me on what sales are happening in our area and what coupons to use out of our local paper. I find that I am spending about 1/4 of my previous spending and most of the time I am getting products for free and even making money on some purchases. This has been a lot of fun and a real eye opener. Plus with the help of these coupon sites, it is not nearly as time consuming as it once was.

We are also using coupon books that we buy yearly for our entertainment. We never pay full price to dine out or for entertainment any more. We have also discovered so many free was in our area to amuse ourselves. We live in the Great Lakes region and there is so much to do for free, I can't imagine why we spent so much traveling. Now that we have a self-contained motor-home we will be taking advantage of some of the really cheap camping accommodations.

We have been looking into our long term health insurance options that we may need during retirement. We want to have a plan that will cover any catastrophic long term illness. On illness could wipe out our total savings if we do not have the right long term health insurance. We want to buy a policy that will adjust for inflation through the life of the policy. With the current health care policy that our government just passed we are not sure as to the best way to go about this yet. We definitely want a policy in place before we retire however.