I received an really interesting e-mail between the holidays. A woman in her fifties (she didn’t give her age), said she wanted to retire early. It was not unlike many e-mails I have received since I started writing this blog back in 2009. She wanted to leave work as soon as possible.

I won’t go into all of her e-mail – it would take too long. But the gist of it was this; what are the steps that she needs to take to retire in 12, 18 or 24 months?

That’s a tall order. No other information about her or her assets or her exact age, or anything was in the e-mail. Her last line was, “Can you please list all the steps I have to take.”

My early retirement was forced on me. I was 52 one day and practically out on the street the next. But I had a plan.

Let’s tackle this over the next few months, shall we? I’ve created a new blog post category called Steps. We’ll start with the big picture; say looking down at this problem she has, from 30,000 feet.

Once we have an idea of the Big Picture, we’ll tackle the individual steps one at a time, so it doesn’t overwhelm you or her.

But let me get this out of the way now. If she is going to retire in 12 months, she’s already got a plan and has an idea of the Big Picture. She probably knows a lot of these steps. But you may not. So here goes . . .

The Big Picture deals with three things; age, income, investments.

Pretty simple huh? You have to know what age you want to take your retirement and work backwards from there to the age you are now. You also have to know how much income you’ll need every month without Social Security.

Right here you are asking why you need to disregard Social Security and right here I have to ask how old you are going to be when you retire? Chances are pretty good I won’t get a Social Security check.

If you’re older than 57, you might get some money. Might.

I’m 57. I can collect my full benefit at my Full Retirement Age (FRA) of 66½ years. It will be ten years from this year; 2024, then I can start to collect my full benefit. Washington says we’ll run out of money for Social Security in 2036.

Washington also says that inflation last year was 1½%. Can you see why I’m worried there won’t be any money left when I get there? We’ll discuss this in more detail, in another blog post.

The last thing you need to consider is your investment plan. Face it. You are not going to retire early keeping your money in a savings account. You need an investment plan that will earn you 20 or 30% a year. You also need an account with $200,000 minimum. 20% of $200,000 is $40,000 annually before tax. Not enough for me to retire. Probably not enough for you either.

Which is better? 20% of $200,000 or 30% of $300,000? You get the idea. You need an investment plan.

There you have it. What age? How much do you need? What’s your rate of return? We’ll dig into each of these in another post.

For Taking Early Retirement (TER), I hope you are enjoying a great retirement or are close to that day!

Jeremiah John