What to do in 10 years time..?

In 10 years time I will reach official retirement age. With life expectancy increasing all the time I can expect to live for 20 or more years after I retire.

Do I have a sufficiently robust financial set up to allow me to maintain my lifestyle for 20 years with no income..? Absolutely not!

The problems affecting state pension systems have been well publicized. The outlook is not good! And here’s the bad news: the same problems are affecting private pension plans.

Most pension plans will not produce the returns that were being forecast 10 – 15 years ago. So, if you want to maintain your lifestyle you’d better have a plan in place to supplement your pension arrangements.

I live in a jurisdiction where you cannot be employed after the age of 60. You can work as a contractor or a consultant, but that means being dismissible at a month’s notice. And I just don’t fancy getting back onto the job market in my early 60′s..!

So what to do..?

Some time ago I recognized that I needed to get my own business set up. Something that I could continue to work for as long as I wanted. But what business?

I could go back into consulting – been there, done that and don’t fancy the footslogging required to build up another consulting business.

What I needed was a growing market. Like the Internet. But the Internet’s full of scams, isn’t it..? Well, yes, it is.

But it’s also the fastest growing market place I know, so if I could find a genuine business that was Internet based, might this not fulfill my needs?

So I started looking. There ARE a lot of scams out there, and a lot of people making a fast buck and disappearing. It’s very easy to spend thousands on the Internet in search of the magic bullet and get virtually nothing in return. They say that up to 95% of people trying to earn money online fail. But the rewards for the other 5% are huge.

What I needed was to find a business with real people, where I could be confident of high ethics, high levels of integrity, a product that had real value and a business that would be around next year, the year after and in 15 years time.

I did a LOT of searching! (And spent quite a bit of money in the process).  What did I learn?

There are NO magic bullets out there. Steer well clear of glossy websites promising huge riches.

Develop or find a product or service that provides good value to a defined group of people and do the work that’s necessary to build a business around it.

I’m finally developing a business that has some legs and solid growth.

It has 3 legs, actually: a web services leg, where I provide web services to small companies, an affiliate marketing leg, where I sell other people’s products for a commission and a leg where I develop and market my own products.

No related posts.