Tom Sightings has written a great piece for the online version of U.S. News & World Report that details both retirees’ typically most substantial expenses, as well as some ways to limit each. There’s actually a lot of good information inside of what is a relatively brief piece; to what is surely no one’s surprise, expenses like housing, health care, and taxes make the list. It is, of course, a great idea to limit one’s expenses in retirement whenever possible, but the reality is that many people will find it to be extremely helpful to double their financial power in retirement by actually making continued employment a component of retirement.

The plain truth is that the definition of retirement is changing for a lot of people – for many, many decades, retirement meant a cessation of work, outright, in our elder years, and taking all of the time we have remaining to stop and smell the proverbial roses. However, the confluence of a variety of socioeconomic factors has required many folks to reconsider just what “being retired” will mean to them – the bottom line is that fully retiring from work may no longer be synonymous with retirement, and that retirement may more commonly be seen as a status wherein the average person is still generating an income, in some form or fashion.

The good news is that working as a senior citizen no longer necessarily means having to get up each morning and going to work, in the way we commonly think of that routine; the advent of Internet-based opportunities to generate income means people can, with increasing frequency, earn additional money from home. As a matter of fact, with communications platforms, more broadly, continuing to evolve, it is now not at all uncommon for people to even work as employees for well-known companies from home. This way of earning money was just not available to our grandparents or even our parents, but it is now available to us, which means that it is more convenient than ever to further enhance our financial strength as “retirees,” and not have to rely solely on the ability to effectively cost-cut in order to stay financially viable as we age.  

Robert G. Yetman, Jr.
Managing Editor, The James L. Paris Report