I planned to publish this post almost a month ago, but was destructed by various family issues. Additionally, our area was impacted by storm Sandy and that caused another delay.

Anyway, I was searching the Internet for retirement blogs and articles (some people called this “doing research on Internet”).  Yahoo published (or republished) the article:

How to Retire Rich: 6 Smart Steps at Ages 50-66 by By Sandy Block and Jane Bennett Clark | Kiplinger Oct. 9, 2012.

In my opinion, whatever was recommended would not make you rich unless you started to execute these common sense wisdom when you just out of the college.  However, I found the interesting statistics in the article:

“Nearly a third of Americans age 55 and older have saved less than $10,000 for retirement, according to the Employee Benefit Research Institute. Only 22% have saved $250,000 or more.”

“And even after you’re eligible for Medicare, you’ll spend a lot of money on health care costs. Fidelity Investments estimates that the average 65-year-old couple will spend $240,000 on health care in retirement.” 

Some of the useful advises are: reassess what you will spend in retirement (I agree, it is never late to do this) and weigh your Social Security options.

Being in sync with the authors, I visited yesterday the local Social Security office to get the estimation on my Social Security benefits. I was pleasantly surprised to hear that if I stop working today and apply for the benefits at my full retirement age, I will have approximately $500 more per month vs. applying for the benefits at 62.  As of today, I‘ll wait until the full retirement age. (Let name this amount as $xxxx.)

Another shocking revelation was that if I would work until my full retirement age, I would have approximately $500 more per month compare to the $xxxx. (My monthly benefits will be $xxxx+$500, which gives me $6,000 extra per year.)  In order to get this $6,000 per year I need to work another 10+ years and pay more than $12,000 per year into Social Security system in the form of taxes (considering my current salary range).  I hope you are getting this: in order to get extra $6k/year I need to pay $12K/year in taxes.  I guess you know what I am planning to do base on this information.

Another article published by Yahoo was How to Retire by 50.  Darrow Kirkpatrick, just 50 years old, and he already retired. I deeply respect people that can manage their finances and have enjoyable lives.  However, I am not sure that that particular lifestyle is for me. “We never drove fancy cars,” Darrow says. “We don’t do a lot of fancy travel. We like to camp, climb, hike, and bike so we don’t have a lot of expensive vacations, although we’ve had a lot of great ones.”.

Additionally, I cannot say that they are retired since “his wife still works as schoolteacher, which helps to secure the family’s health insurance”.

The article provided the link to the great blog (http://www.caniretireyet.com/) that has a lot of useful information. Please take some time and visit it, you will not regret!