What do you need to retire?

I would say a bare minimum would be owning your land (hopefully 2 1/2 acres or more) that you can grow healthy organic food on with good water rights and have the house and land completely paid for.

Then you need enough retirement income coming in to support you through all this or you need to work part time to keep it all working. However, you need to check to see how much you can earn a year without reducing your social security or retirement income too.

Having your land and house and car or cars paid for can be really really important and thinking about what it is going to cost to maintain your home and to pay property taxes is really important too.

And you have to consider that an average of inflation is considered to be 4% per year on average. So, what your money buys now it won't buy 10 years from now which might be 40 percent less than it buys now.

So, what if you live to 100? how much money are you going to need and how are you going to get it if your retirement income isn't enough.

Also, you want medicare if you can get it which cost a minimum of a couple hundred a month for you which they usually deduct right out of your social security. But, if your income (or your wife's in combination with yours is too much you might be paying 400 to 600 a month because of your income level too.

So, all these things and more need to be considered. My neighbor who is a retired Eye Doctor said to me: "Isn't Medicare amazing Fred?"

Yes. when I had my burst appendix if I hadn't been in medicare this would have cost me $40,000 to $60,000. But, with medicare it cost me only about $1500 total.

So, "Isn't medicare amazing?" Yes. It is.

But, surviving to 65 so you can get it is awful. I was paying 1400 dollars a month for health insurance for coverage when I was 64 by the way. And this is about what my wife is still paying for herself and our youngest daughter who is under 26 by the way too. (You can put your children on your policies until they are 26 by the way) I think she might be paying 1600 or more a month for the 2 of them at this point.

So, for men and women surviving from about 50 to 64 is hell in buying health insurance. Luckily we could afford me until Medicare and now we can also afford her and our daughter too.

But, many people are not as lucky and when you ONLY do catastrophic health care because you don't have insurance many people die with just catatstrophic health care without insurance because the real problems often are not diagnosed in a timely fashion which then causes deaths because those mole hills become mountains that those mountains sometimes kill.

So, think carefully about  your health care need between 50 and 64. This is important to me because without health insurance at age 50 that was good I would have died in 1998. And this is the truth.

Without GOOD health care I would have died and my then 2 1/2 year old daughter and my 9 or 10 year old daughter and my 20 something son would have had to go on without me. So, think carefully about what I'm saying here.

First you have to survive to retirement with good enough health to be able to enjoy it.

Otherwise, it's all meaningless.