28 Ways to Make Early Retirement Work for You

Dramatically Reduce What You Spend on Housing

Your biggest expense? Your household, most likely. This is why if you can reduce what you spend on housing, you’ll see a huge improvement to your retirement savings. This move alone can help shift your early retirement form the ‘if’ category to the ‘definitely happening’.

For a typical retirement savings plan, you should aim to reduce your housing costs down to just 30% of your income. But for early retirement, your aim should be as low as 15% or 20%.

This is often impossible without relocating to a more affordable city, so keep that in mind if you want to reach your goals sooner. You should also think about refinancing your mortgage, getting a reverse mortgage if you don’t plan on moving.

Finally, you can think about downsizing…

Go Smaller — Even Tiny!

How big a house do you need? Four bedrooms? Three baths?  Huge garage to accommodate three cars? Hold on, you may have instead asked yourself how big a house you WANT.

Those are two very different questions.

You have to start focusing on how much you need, not how much you want. Not everyone can live in a big mansion during retirement. And downsizing will help you towards achieving an early retirement more than you might think, boosting your savings while also reducing long term housing costs.