Early Retirement Blog

Living a green lifestyle can save your retirement, and allow you to achieve your retirement plans, even after the housing and stock market crashes.  Living a green lifestyle and consuming less,  allows you to save more for your retirement,  need less savings to retire, and enables you to retire much earlier.

A green lifestyle is a low consumption lifestyle, conserving natural resources, conserves your financial resources.  For example, if you decide to give up your car in retirement, you can retire with $180,000 less in savings.  Get rid of your $150 per month mini-storage unit and retire with $45,000 less in required retirement savings.  With these two simple lifestyle choices, an individual can retire with $225,000 less in required savings, and therefore several years earlier.

And going green before retirement, reducing your consumption and investing the savings, can add up to a very nice retirement nest egg.  For instance, if you are 35 married and own two cars, giving up one of your cars and investing it’s $600 monthly expense,  will give you an additional $455,000 in retirement savings by age 55.

These examples of how going green helps save your retirement, were determined using the Green Retirement Planning formula and method, a new formula and method that calculates the positive retirement benefit of living a green lifestyle.  The Green Retirement formula can also be used to calculate retirement savings needs, replacing the traditional formula which over estimates required savings, enabling individuals to retire with dramatically less savings.

The current formula for calculating your retirement savings needs, assumes that you will need to be able to spend between 70%-80% of your current salary annually in retirement, it is a guess that treats everyone the same no matter how much the actually consume.   For instance, if you earn $80,000 per year, traditional retirement planning calculates that you will need $1,600,000 to retire.

Instead, the Green Retirement formula calculates how much you will need in retirement, based on how much you will spend in retirement.  A much more accurate method.  You control your spending, therefore you control how much savings you will need for retirement, not your salary.

If you have a retirement budget of $3,000 per month Green Retirement calculates that you will need $900,000 to retire, and if you reduce your retirement budget to $2,500 per month, then you need $750,000 to retire.  The greener your lifestyle, the less you consume in retirement, the less savings you need to safely support your retirement.  In some cases, the Green Retirement method enables individuals to retire with $1 million less in savings, and a decade earlier than they could with traditional retirement planning.   On the Green Retirement website, their is a free retirement calculator, which compares Green vs. Traditional.

This simple common sense approach, is actually a revolutionary development in retirement planning, that changes how retirement is calculated.  Now, Americans are no longer bound by an arbitrary number, but are instead able to determine their own retirement savings needs.  By living a green lifestyle both before and during retirement, Americans can retire with a lot less savings and many years earlier, than they ever imagined was possible.  Going green can save your retirement.