5 Things Holding You Back From Retiring Early

Photo by Andre Taissin on Unsplash

In my 30 years on Earth, I have yet to meet a person who works a 9–5 job and doesn’t want to retire early. Quite frankly, people’s desire to retire early doesn’t surprise me and it probably doesn’t surprise you either. It’s a well-known fact that between low wages, bad bosses and finite advancement opportunities, people aren’t exactly thrilled to be going into work every day. As such, they view early retirement as a gateway to a more fulfilling and happier life. Sadly though, for many, this dream will only ever remain a dream because they continue to succumb to the many roadblocks on their path down the early retirement highway. Fortunately, if you know what to look out for, retiring early can be achieved and as such here are 5 things holding most people back from leaving the workforce years sooner than they ever imagined.

Number 1: Lack of a retirement plan

Depending on how old you are, you may or may not remember going on family road trips with your parents and them pulling out a big city map whenever they wanted to venture to a new location. In fact, it’s crazy to think how reliant we were on a simple piece of paper to get us from point A to B and that one missed direction could lead to hours of frustration. However, it speaks to the importance of knowing where you’re going and when it comes to retiring early, without a plan you truly will be like a driver without a map.

As we already noted, most people want to retire early, just like they want to lose weight or want to become rich. They want all of these great things but they have absolutely no plan in place to achieve them. This, if you ask me, is one of the biggest indicators that you will in fact never retire early.

Now, if you’re sinking in your seat because you yourself don’t presently have a retirement plan in place, don’t worry I’ve got your back.

In your retirement plan, you’re going to need three things. You are going to need a target retirement amount, an investment amount and a budget.

Your target retirement amount is going to be the total amount you’ll need to have invested. This is the pool of money that you will withdraw from throughout your golden years so it’s essential that you properly calculate this figure. Generally, the…