I was lucky. I listened to my wife and we both started to save as much as we could when we were working. That allowed us to retire at age 55. We have now been retired for 10 years. She took her SS benefit at age 62 and I will try and delay mine past my full retirement age of 66. I looked at the retirement problem differently then most analyst. I looked at it as a cash flow in, cash flow out based on the life style we wanted. One of the best pieces of information I read in the process was this: Look at what it takes to just live your life with the necessities and set up a guaranteed cash flow to cover those expenses. Then no matter what the market does you will have money to survive. This is what I did first. The second best piece of advice I read was: Your money does not take care of itself. You have to be proactive when it comes to your investments. I made sure I was well educated on where and how to invest. Some people let some one else manage their funds I preferred to do the management my self. So far the strategy has worked well for me. The last piece of advice was: Make a budget and analyze where you spend your money. If you do not know where your bleeding cash you can't fix it.
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