Retirement Project

We each make sense of money in our own way, and with our own distinct bias. We have varying PC skills. Our ages differ. What we have each done so far differs. And what we're each worth today differs.

Those gaps make it hard to write something worthwhile for each of us on the subject of retirement financing.

In this section, we take a look at the holes in retirement planning. I have done my best to make this very simple, and left out the complex stuff.

In 1992, when I closed my firm, there was no quality knowledge or support for a small business owner in trouble. I spent a few years (this was before the Internet) talking to hundreds of folk about what was happening to me, and what they were doing to prevent the same disaster hurting them. Each of them had a single idea or two, but very few had a strategy. These ideas were the seeds of what eventually became the Crashproof your Business strategies.

It seems that the retirement process has much the same dearth of unbiased information, or advisors without vested interests. The industry structure has grown in a way that makes it almost impossible for an advisor to survive on consulting fees without getting income from product sales as well. This means that the more we know about how money works, how the myriad calcs are done, and what questions we should ask, the more likely we are to get the results we want.

I don’t think any advisor worth his/her salt will have a problem dealing with the questions a little bit of knowledge is going to inspire. But this issue is far too important to be handled without understanding exactly how your money is working towards your old age.

I hope you enjoy playing with the calculators, and leave with a better understanding of how simple it all should be. If you have not yet done the survey we're conducting on your biggest concerns regarding retirement, may I humbly ask you to invest 2 minutes doing it here?

• What will I be worth?
  
  Our calculator shows you what the BIG number, the total of all your life savings when you retire, really means in today's Rands?
• What Income will I Get?
  
  Our calculator shows you, in today's terms, what kind of income will your life savings buy you when you reach 65?
• How Much More Must I Save?
  
  Our calculator show you how much more (or less) you must save to get to the income you want after 65, in todays currency.