Raising the Eligibility Age for Government Retirement Benefits Doesn’t Mean You Have to Wait to Retire
When you retire is up to you, not the government
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France is in an uproar because President Emmanuel Macron has raised the country’s official retirement age from 62 to 64.
Every time someone suggests raising the eligibility age for Social Security in the U.S., people go ballistic.
Why?
If you want to retire, you can do it at any age. You don’t need the government’s permission.
What you need is the financial wherewithal to provide for yourself.
The primary argument for raising the Social Security eligibility age is to preserve the Social Security Trust Fund. People are living and collecting benefits longer, putting a strain on the system that needs to be fixed. There are other issues to consider when formulating a plan to preserve Social Security, but that’s not the point I want to make here.
My point is:
Raising the eligibility age for government retirement benefits does not mean the retirement age is raised.
You can retire whenever you want. You just need to be responsible for yourself.
Instead of getting all tied up in knots about when you can start collecting money from the government (and yes, I know, we’ve all paid into the system), consider what retirement means to you.
You may stop working, but you’re not going to stop living. What are you going to do?
Wealth advisor Michelle Ogden says we should spend as much of our life living our retirement vision as possible. She says:
We were never mean to earn our living doing something that we hate so much that we can’t wait to quit doing it.
Read her article:
