Do you really want to be taken out of service? Look, it's okay to take a voluntary move out of an existing service, but it doesn't mean you have to stop everything you're doing. You can change your model and continue to have significance in a new way even if you retire at the dentist retirement average (high 60’s and climbing).

If you have financial freedom, you can change the model and continue to do the things that make you relevant, and be someone who still is serving/giving to others in many ways. This could be through your current business, profession or in other venues. But to actually “retire”? Let's just throw that word out.

Back to my main question, How is your retirement scorecard? What does that mean?

In a recent online forum thread, a question was posed to a lot of doctors – When do you want to retire? Of course, the responses were all across the board. There are people that are hoping to retire by 55 or 60. Some have retired by 50 or 55. 

Some are still working past 60 or 64 (the dentist retirement average is 69), and enjoying it.

So there's a whole range out there, but the big question came down to:

How much do you need to retire?

What's the number to aim for? All kinds of numbers were thrown out, but it's always a single number. Someone said $10 million liquid. $10 million liquid sounds like cash in the bank or maybe you've got it in CDs or something similar that's very, very liquid.

But what’s that going to do for you? See, you don’t need an accumulation number. You need cash flow. You need asset based income.

Wall Street Based income is all over the board. Yes, you can buy dividend stocks, but to learn how to orchestrate actual cash flow from your financial assets is really the key to knowing when and how you can actually “retire”, if you want to use that word.

When you’re in that accumulation game, deciding on the number to work towards which is really just a guess, you’re throwing darts at the board and saying, “Well, I think it's 10. I think it's 12. I think it's $15 million.” 

Even if you can get to that goal, that's not going to give you any sense of relief or any sense of peace of mind. If you don't make it to that goal (which is often the case), then you will have to make other decisions such as to keep grinding it out for several more years.

For most people, it's going to be harder and harder to follow the conventional model of save, save, save, put your money in a 401k, keep your fingers crossed and hope for the best.

The forward thinking of most of the economists that I read and consult with today is that the next decades are going to be heavy on taxation, inflation, probably economic malaise, and stock market malaise with anemic returns – much less than what we've known in the last four decades.

The constructs have changed completely. 

You've got to be on the forefront of a cash flow model for retirement, not an accumulation model. You need to know how much cash flow you need per month, and then reverse engineer into what kind of assets to invest in that will produce that. To see this in action, here’s a video I created that shows you how to calculate how much you need.

That's what we do in Freedom Founders. That's what changes our Members’ lives in such a short period of time. Many times they realize that they already had enough and that they just need to re-allocate some of their assets into cash-flow-producing assets that hedge against inflation, making sure they have a cash flow number (not an accumulation number) that sustains their lifestyle.

It's a game changer. 

You've got to change the way you think about this, if you're going to make moves to get “there” (wherever “there” is for you) in a timely fashion, and not continue to put off and procrastinate to a someday down the road that may never come.