Retirement Home "Bricks"

It might seem a little odd that I’m thinking about retirement while in my early 30’s, but I do. I think about it all the time. I don’t envision myself being the type of retired person who sits around watching television. I like doing things and being busy with projects to work on. This is how I envision my retirement, too; working on projects and visiting my kids and grandkids.

The longer I work for an employer the more I realize that I can’t depend on my “JOB” to help me build my retirement. In fact, my job has really only barely provided me with enough to live on in the present (bills, food, travel, etc…). I’m not being pessimistic, I’m being realistic. If I were to work for my present employer for the rest of my working life, and if this were my only source of income, I’d be in a LOT of trouble. I can’t do it forever. No one can. Eventually I will have to stop working. I’ve seen it happen to good people. Either we get too old, too sick or too apathetic to keep working. Our expenses, however, will not only continue, but are likely to increase as our health decreases.

My parents’ generation, for the most part, worked towards broken & breaking systems like pensions and social security. My generation is different. I posit that my generation is a transitional one. We’re the bridging generation, taxed with phasing from one way of living to another. I believe that my parents’ generation marked the end of the industrial-age workers and my children’s generation will be the first successfully implemented information-age generation. My generation, in my opinion, is working out all the kinks between the two. Just look at all the current systems that are in turmoil and scrutiny; healthcare, global economic (currency) change, environmental awareness and sustainability, technological advancement and resource management to name just a few. My generation is largely transitional and transient by nature. Although we are probably this way because we’re free-spirited, part of me believes that we couldn’t live the way our parents did even if we wanted to. That ship has sailed. That way of living wasn’t sustainable. Well… not the pensions and social security parts, anyway.

Social security is pretty much dead and pensions are going, if they haven’t already gone, the way of the dodo too. Employers don’t want to support their employees’ healthcare during their employment, let alone supporting all their living expenses throughout their retirement! Nowadays, it behooves the individual to aggressively and passionately plan out and work towards their own retirement, and I’m not just talking about 401Ks!

I don’t think most people see their retirement years for what they really will or could be (for better or worse). I don’t think most of us, in my generation, really take the time to do the math... to project into the future and actually calculate the estimated expenses. If they did, I suspect it would frighten them into doing about it. The numbers really are quite sobering when you do this exercise. With rising inflation & the cost of living increasing, with wages stagnating and the dollar dropping to all-time lows, it’s really not a very pleasant thought after all - no wonder so many don’t work it out on paper. Most of us are having enough trouble with just living from day to day, without increasing our stress by envisioning our potentially bleak futures. It’s gotten to the point where most of us are not even able to live on just ONE job anymore. The rising trend these days is for folks to have a day job and a “side job” or two. This doesn’t necessarily mean having another employer, per se (thank heaven), but perhaps just working more.

For me, this rising trend has been somewhat fortuitous. While many people prefer to come home after a hard day’s work and relax in front of the television, I enjoy having a constant side project to tinker with. I just like doing it. The other part of the trend that works for me is the fact that many of these new business-owners (side-jobbing self-employers) need logo designs to help their companies establish a face. Every business needs a logo, and logo design is what I do… on the side, ironically enough.

Most all of my, “on-the-side” projects, although extremely varied in their content, have one running theme. They are tools in my future-building arsenal. All of them contribute to my plan to have multiple streams of income pouring into my retirement years. Sadly enough, even logo designing isn’t sustainable. Although enjoyable, by its very nature this service requires my time and attention, not to mention my ability, availability and interest… all of which have an unknown but definite expiration date attached to them. Conversely, whenever I create a product, develop an invention or invest in a real asset, I place another brick in the structure of my figurative “retirement home.” My job (and logo designing) is merely meant to sustain my life & energy as I accumulate these bricks.

Because I know I’m limited on time, and because I’m not even sure how much time that is, I’m very proactive about the accumulation of these bricks. I read a very simple formula for provident living which states, “Learn to differentiate between assets and liabilities, and then spend your time and resources accumulating as many assets as possible.” Simple and powerful.

I’ve been working on many of these “bricks” for a long time. Some of them are small, and some of them have very large potential. Some of them are very exciting. All of them are extremely important to the structural integrity of my retirement home. But just like a home is build using many different materials, my figurative retirement home is being constructed with an assortment of brick types. Through my work on patent-pending inventions, commercial products, the writing & illustrating of several children’s books, investing in network marketing and development of other types of intellectual properties, I plan (literally) on creating a very aggregated retirement. I love this stuff. And it’s lucky that I do because, sadly, in order to build an even moderately comfortable retirement home, my entire generation will need to build likewise, like it or not.