How to Bring Down your Retirement “Number”

I've recently been asked to put up some finance articles for a client. I'm not a big fan of finance writing; I'm only a mediocre fan of personal finance writing, but that is what this client is going to get. To move myself into a finance-writing state of mind, I'm going to write a sample for you guys about that dreadful personal retirement number.

This “number” as it is referenced in some stupid investment commercial is the amount of money you need to save to live the way you want for the rest of your life without working. From what I understand in the commercial, you then spend all that money on a large object that advertises that exact figure to everyone around you. You then have to carry the object around everywhere you go and attempt to protect it, unless you save it in this particular bank which will make the object more durable.

Anyway, most of the articles I'm putting together will be about boring crap like keeping debt down, bringing savings up, maybe a little bit about how to invest...everything to get to that number faster or at all. I've been thinking though, maybe America is looking at this problem the wrong way. Maybe instead of making our savings larger, we need to be making that magic number smaller.

If you're like me, you expect, if you retire at 60, that damn medical science is going to keep you alive just as long after retirement as you were working. You need a way to cut down those post-retirement expenses and I don't mean stockpiling coupons and harassing the cashier to give you 3 cents per unit off of every kind of produce you buy. You need some substantial ways to lower that magic number. Here are five excellent ways to do that.

#1: Take up Smoking

If you consider the cost of food, rent, electricity and healthcare for normal wear and tear for every month after you turn seventy, the cost of cigarettes is actually pretty low. You could trade the long agonizing death from living old age in poverty to the comparatively short and painful death from the many harmful results of smoking. Also, it seems to have some short term benefits for the people who do it.

#2: Drink More

This is great combined with the method above. There are known liver and kidney problems caused by alcohol. Less organs not only means less money spent taking care of them, but also a shorter lifespan. Of course, this isn't the biggest benefit of drinking. Drinking is the greatest way to make irresponsible choices, which is great for bring the number of years you'll have to buy booze and grits down.

#3: Get Married(Females only)

This advice only works for females. According to Elizabeth Gilbert's book Committed, women who get married are less successful in life and more likely to die a violent death, fall into alcoholism, etc. This will not work for men, however, because this comparison is reversed for males. Single men are likely to die a violent death, fall into alcoholism, work a dead-end job all their life, etc than married men.

#4: Eat at McDonalds

Or any similar fast food outlet, really. As long as you consume more calories than you burn. This will ramp up your chances for heart attack, stroke, suffocating due to getting stuck in doorways, and many other fun ailments. Not only that, but people who are obese also have the benefit of their body naturally wearing down and aging faster than those who try not to live like a fat piece of crap.

#5: Vote Republican

If you're really out to stop medical science from prolonging your life, the best way is to stop all scientific development, education and continue the country's previous path to the collapse of the unsustainable healthcare industry. Throw on some unnecessary wars and ultra-unnecessary tax breaks for the wealthiest one percent of Americans and you will be set for a miserable nonfuture for all of America.

If you manage to perform all five of these things, the amount of money you will need when you leave the working world can be substantially reduced, possibly all the way to $0!