Many people begin too late to prepare for retirement. I like to think of the considerations needed to be ready for retirement as a baseball diamond consisting of four bases.

First Base is allocating money in your budget for adequate life insurance for the husband, the wife, and possibly small policies on the children.

Second Base is systematic saving with plans designed to reach the funded money needed at different points in your life preparing for retirement.

Third base is acquisition of adequate family medical insurance, with an assisted living benefit, and covered burial and death expenses. This needs to be a budget item. Too many people wait until health problems arise and members pass on to fund those expenses.

Home Plate is where do you want to retire. Take trips and plan where you want to live after you are retired and determine the anticipated living expenses in that area now. Then project them with inflation built in for the date when you want to retire.

I have included the link to a article that appeared on Yahoo recently with a professional estimate of the amount of savings needed at different ages.

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/heres-much-money-saved-every-141702355.html?soc_src=mail&soc_trk=ma

Regardless of your age now and the ages of the other family members, it is not too late to set up a plan to begin savings and planning for a retirement. The family needs to set a budget that is realistic and goal oriented so the retiring couple can realize their dream of retirement in a place they selected and planned for comfortably.

This Month’s Income Opportunity
Most people are probably not aware that magazines want full articles, short stores, jokes, and stories about actual personal or family experiences. If you sign up with Real Writing Jobs it provides the names of the magazines which includes the Saturday Evening Post and many other publications that want articles. It explains how to submit the articles and gives the addresses for submission. The articles can be submitted on line.
There are numerous job opportunities for editing , SEO optimization of existing dialog, data entry, proofreading, blog writing, and personal assistants all listed in the Real Writing Jobs lists.
Click on this link Real Writing Jobs The cost for this service is a one time fee of less than $40 after a 50% discount coupon on the site.