One morning, not too long ago, I woke up and realized I didn’t have nearly enough money to retire. I knew I needed to do something, and to do it fast so that my financial future in my later years would be secure. After much research and trial and error, I came up with the Retirement Accelerator Program.
I have always been a creative, free-spirit. One who doesn’t necessarily follow all the rules. In many respects this has served me well. I have a great life with a fantastic family. We have had all kinds of great experiences from attending local weekend art shows to traveling to Europe multiple times. Life has been not just good, but great!
But as I got older I began to realize that for my life to continue to be amazing, I would need money to continue these experiences. That means I would need to continue to work – into my 60’s, 70’s and beyond. I hadn’t planned for the future.
My finances were a train wreck on a massive scale.
I knew something had to change. But, before I share my solution, let me explain how I got to this point.
Things came easily to me early on. I didn’t have to work hard to achieve success.
In elementary school, things game very easy to me. I was a fast learner who didn’t get into trouble. I could read from an early age. I grasped math concepts quickly. Often I would complete my assignments early, and the teachers had to find alternate tasks for me to while the rest of the class was finishing. I was creative, and curious, and by finishing my work early, I had time to do the fun things!
Soon my parents and teachers were calling me smart. While this may seem like a good thing to know, when you are in 3rd grade, in later years it is a huge issue in later years.
After a few years however things began to change.
In High School, knowing I was smart became a huge problem for me. Where before I was getting straight A’s, now I was called the Anchor-man.
The Anchor-man is the person who sets the “other” end of the curve. Someone gets the highest grade and that is the A. I was setting the bottom end, which was the F.
I was in all the AP (Advanced Placement) classes. Normal classes were too easy for me. My parents and counselors thought I’d be more challenged in the harder courses.
I remember one time when I was taking an advanced English class as a sophomore in High School. The teacher had assigned the book “Fahrenheit 451” by Ray Bradbury, (one of my favorite SciFi writers). We needed to read the book and write a report on it.
Well, I had read the book several years earlier, and didn’t feel like I needed to re-read it.
So I didn’t. I wrote the report based on what I remembered and turned it in. I got an “F”. You see, my understanding of the book was from a 10-year-old’s perspective, and not as advanced as a high schooler’s. My teacher saw this and graded me accordingly.
Also, I knew how to take a test, and get a decent grade without studying too hard.
But I almost never did the assignments. This created a big problem.
Every class is a combination of assignments and tests. I’d do great on one, and horrible on the other. This averaged out to low C’s in most cases.
Thankfully, I was able to graduate High School, my senior year, but just barely. As you can imagine my parents weren’t super happy with me.
I didn’t have the grades to go to college like all my friends. Instead I took a gap year, and traveled (which was an amazing experience). I tried to apply to different schools from over seas, but all the institutions thought I was a foreign student, and sent me the wrong paperwork.
So when I came home, I didn’t have anywhere to go to college. Again, I had a disappointed mom and dad.
Instead I got a job having fun at a local sporting goods store where I took up rock climbing and mountain biking and skiing. I also had a great discount on all the equipment.
During business hours I would sell clothes and gear, and after hours we would go and play!
I made OK money – enough to pay the bills and have a little extra. All the extra went to buying bikes, ropes, and technical clothing. I had all the latest and greatest gear from Patagonia, The North Face, and many other cool brands.
In my 20’s when I should have been putting away $100 a month, I was blowing it on shoes and camping gear.
(Note: If you save $100 a month for 45 years at a 10% growth rate, you will be a millionaire)
After 3 years of living this awesome life, I was now in my young 20’s. All of my friends from the High School AP classes were graduating from college. Some were going into Medical School. Others into Finance in NYC. I was essentially a beach bum.
Then one day, we got notice that the store was closing. The recession of the early 90’s hit me, and hit me hard. I had a couple of weeks to figure out what I would be doing for the rest of my life.
Suddenly, I was a 23 year old with no job. No way of paying for my apartment or insurance, or food.
I had to go back to my parents and ask for help. Which as we all know is not easy!
They gave me 2 choices. I could live at home and follow their rules and they would help me out, or I could go my own way. Well, I knew the second option didn’t work so I agreed to their terms.
I enrolled in the local Junior College. That’s where I met my wonderful wife. I began by taking just 4 classes: English, Math, History, and Chemistry.
After a couple of years I had an Associates degree in Chemistry, and I was transferring to a 4 year state school. Thankfully I didn’t have to apply. I had done all the steps during JR college to ensure guaranteed admission.
But now I had a new set of problems.
I was living at home while getting my AA. I had a small temp job on the side working as a technology assistant for some teachers. It gave me a little bit of money on the side for gas and insurance, and “fun stuff”. But it wasn’t nearly enough to live on.
Now that I was moving out, and living on my own to go to real college I needed more money. That’s when I took out my first student loan.
Of course I didn’t use that money to pay for living expenses. I bought a brand new Apple PowerBook Duo 270c for $3,100 (my entire room & board budget for the semester).
I played a lot of Sid Meier’s Civilization on that little computer in my small 1 room studio behind some guy’s house in Willow Glen.
Of course I still needed money for life – I had to pay rent, and eat, and buy books and lab supplies. So I got a job at a tech company working the graveyard shift.
I figured this would allow me to stay on top of my classes during the day, and still be able to make money and get some job experience at night.
Soon my studies began to suffer. I was tired from working between 10 pm and 6 am. Although I didn’t ever fall asleep in class, I did frequently sleep in and miss classes.
By the time it was supposed to be my last semester, I had already taken out 4 student loans to the sum of around $20,000, and was several classes short of graduating on time.
I was embarrassed and ashamed. I figured the best thing to do was to lie about it all.
Without a diploma, I applied to a job in the Silicon Valley as a biochemist. The dot com boom was in full swing. The company I wanted to work at needed someone who could both work in the lab and update their computers to be Y2K compliant.
To this day, I don’t know how they hired me. Although I was honest about my work experience (both at the technology assistant and the graveyard science work) I lied on my application about my education, and I guess the HR department never followed up with that.
For 7 years I worked in Science and made a great salary. Not a single penny was put into a 401k or any other kind of investment.
Note: If I had maxed out my 401k at the time (which I could have easily done) at $1,875 per month, I’d have $3,020,000 at retirement age.
I didn’t get fired, but did get burned out. So I quit and became a not so successful entrepreneur.
Over the next 25 years I had a number of other different jobs – None of them were salaried, and of course I didn’t save a single penny for retirement.
The only good decision I made was to get married and buy a house. I knew that paying rent every month was just throwing money away. So in 2008 we bought our first house for $220,000. At 8% interest rate. With only 3.5% down Our payments were the same as our old apartment rent.
We had fun. Traveling, buying things, and just living. We would refinance as the interest rates dropped, and take out a little extra each time to have some more fun money to play with.
The years turned into decades, and now I’m a 53 year old with no real job, and zero in retirement savings.
Something had to change, and change quickly.
Like most people I would scroll Instagram every night. Sure I’d see the funny memes, and political stuff, and other topics that interested me. But every so often a young mother would come on showing her income report for the month.
Each had their own unique side hustle that would bring in hundreds, or even thousands of dollars. Of course they claimed they only worked a few hours per day, and that it gave them the freedom their family needed.
At first it sounded too good to be true. How could a busy mom make an extra $5-10K per month by selling an online class or doing 1:1 phone calls. I was skeptical.
But I was also very curious. I began to dive deep into the world of social media marketing, and side hustles, and soon realized that I too could do this. All I needed was an Idea.
Something I was passionate about and had enough knowledge on to teach others.
I took all my skills acquired over the last 30 years, and came up with an idea. This idea.
The one you are reading about right now
In a nutshell it is how to quickly save for retirement when you don’t have anything, and don’t have a lot of options for anything either.
There are lots of retirement websites devoted to how to begin saving for retirement, or best ways to invest. Or even retire early. But nothing on starting late and still doing it. And doing it quickly! Because if you are like me you are running out of time.
Of course, these strategies will work for anyone. Young or old. I’ve given myself a 10 year timeline to go from nothing in retirement savings to completely done with work.
Follow me on my journey!
I hope you will join me in learning more about side hustles, and how to leverage social media to achieve your financial goals. I’m here to help!
Thanks for reading this far, and I’ll see you on-line!