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How to Run Your Retirement Like a Small Business

Budgeting and cash flow are two keys

Barry Silverstein
Crow’s Feet: Life As We Age

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Image by Nattanan Kanchanaprat from Pixabay

One of the scariest aspects of retirement is dreading that you’ll run out of money. One of the best ways to prevent this is to run your retirement like a small business.

I started and ran a small business for 20 years. I didn’t have a degree in business, but I learned very quickly that two keys to running a successful small business are budgeting and cash flow. When my wife and I retired, I applied these two keys to running our retirement.

Budgeting

Creating a basic budget doesn’t have to be complicated. List all of your expenses in line item form. If spreadsheets intimidate you, use paper. It’s important to account for everything you spend money on in specific categories, such as “Clothing, Groceries, Auto Gas, Mortgage, Travel” and so on. Include a “Miscellaneous” line item for anything that doesn’t easily fit into a category.

Create a budget worksheet from your categories. When you spend money, record it in the correct category. Then add all the purchases up for each category and track your expenses by month, quarter and year. Presto — you have created an expense budget!

Once you have an understanding of how you actually spend your money, you can start the budgeting

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