As you get closer to retirement, you may be feeling a little uneasy about your finances. If you feel like you should have had more money saved and invested by now then looking ahead may be a little frightening. You definitely need to make sure that your finances match your goals for retirement otherwise you may not be able to live the way you like once you are done working.
The nice thing to know is that it is never too late to get started saving and investing for your retirement. There are a lot of ways to give your efforts a big boost, too. There are so many ways to make your money work for you and with some changes to your mindset you can definitely get your finances right where you had imagined they’d be when you retire. In this article, we will give you several ideas.
1 – Look into cryptocurrency
Although we would never suggest putting your retirement funds into cryptocurrency, there is a place for it within your retirement strategy. Cryptocurrency can be very volatile so it is a bit risky. The key to remember is to not invest more than you can lose.
The reason it can be a good investment is precisely because of its volatility, however. This means that instead of slow and steady profits like you get from dividends from investments like index funds, you can see your gains rise very quickly. If you time things right, you can sell at the peak and see a tidy windfall.
If you look at the trends of cryptocurrency overall, and in particular altcoins like Dogecoin and Ripple, then you’ll see that even with the crashes, it has been an upward trend for years. This means that you could buy in with some modest investment and hold onto it until you feel ready to cash out. Just make sure to stay informed so you can ride out the crashes that will inevitably come and try to time your exit well.
Just look up where to buy Dogecoin in Canada and you’ll find a way that’s right for you.
2 – Get frugal
Think about living on less money as a training routine for when you retire. When you have a fixed income, even with a nice retirement fund, you will not want to spend money as freely as you do now. At least you shouldn’t. Retirement often means having to adjust your lifestyle and not spending as much money on things you don’t really need.
If you start getting frugal now then it will become a habit and you can definitely stretch your retirement funds. Not only that, but the money you save now can be used to put more money into your savings accounts and into your investments.
Just by adding a few thousand dollars a year toward some index funds, you will see some really unexpected results in a decade or so.
The problem when people hear the word frugal is that they imagine having to eat porridge for breakfast and lunch and skip dinner. Or, that they need to shop at Goodwill stores and wear beat up clothes.
This isn’t what frugal actually means. It means being intentional with your spending. Think twice about a purchase and sleep on it. You may find that you really don’t need it after all. Buy in bulk for things that you use all the time so you save a few dollars. Lastly, wait for sales and save there as long as you are not buying things you don’t need just because they’re on sale.
3 – Do house hacking
Usually a mortgage is the biggest expense a family has. Your mortgage could be the thing holding back your retirement dreams since it is making it harder to save money and invest. You can seriously reduce your mortgage by house hacking.
This is a system in which you do things like rent out a room in your home on Airbnb, for example, so you can reduce your mortgage. Many people will sell a big house and then move into a duplex or triplex so they can rent out one or two of the units and then live in the other one for essentially free.
The money that you save on your mortgage can go into your retirement funds. Not only that, but you are also increasing your home value by quite a lot of money and even paying down your mortgage so you are able to pay it off before your retirement. Then, you can continue living there and take in this income, or buy a condo somewhere and downsize and still have no mortgage to pay later on.
4 – Work longer
You may have already started the countdown for the day you hit 65 and will retire. You dream of sipping mojitos on a beach somewhere and throwing away your alarm clock. However, delaying your retirement even by one or two years can make a huge difference in your retirement fund.
Think about how a one year salary saved up can be made to stretch quite a bit if you were to delay your retirement by that one year. It could be put entirely into a high risk investment that will pay off handsomely if the market is looking good and if you lose some of it then you only really lost a bit of your time since it essentially was house money.
You could even simply have it as a cash reserve for an unexpected emergency. It never hurts to have a little extra cash since you never know what can happen when you’re older.
Conclusion
To make sure you can live your retirement on your own terms, it takes having the right amount of money. And to have the right amount of money you sometimes have to get creative. These tips should give you a few ideas on how you can give your retirement savings a nice boost.