Like so many other things, retirement used to be much simpler. You worked until you were about 65, then you retired. The world of work is changing, and retirement is changing with it. Whatever your age, there are new retirement options for you.

Mini-retirement is probably the most positive development because it teaches people to save and gives everyone the opportunity to pursue their dreams. There are so many wonderful things to do when you are younger, whether it’s traveling around the world or spending more time with your kids before they grow up. The catch is that you have to start saving now to make it work. A mini-retirement might involve taking off three months after three years of working and saving, which requires different investment plans than a full retirement thirty years from now. Long run arguments in favor of stocks clearly do not work here. A balanced allocation of stocks, bonds, and precious metals is the best way to get a reasonable rate of return without having to worry about a market crash happening at the wrong time.

Working retirement can be either heaven or hell, and your financial planning today makes all the difference. Do you have a money-making hobby? If so, you might be able to turn it into the part-time job of your dreams and retire early. Maybe you have already retired, but you are bored and cannot afford the things that you really want. Part-time work is a great way to earn that money, and it might also make life more interesting. Finally, many people end up working at jobs that they hate during their retirements because they haven’t saved enough money. If you are having trouble saving money, it might be a good idea to start one of those money-making hobbies.

There seems to be a retirement option for everyone these days. Early retirement has long been the dream of many, and aggressive saving is the proven way to accomplish it. The people with the determination to achieve early retirement often end up looking for a new challenge and go back to work after only a few years. What they really had was not an early retirement, but a temporary retirement. A temporary retirement gives you several years, so you can accomplish far more than you could with a mini-retirement. However, a temporary retirement is also far more affordable than an early retirement. A temporary retirement can be perfect for pursuing a degree or a youthful passion that you abandoned as impractical. 

There are far more options for self-employment and part-time work than there were only a decade ago, and that gives us new ways to retire. With all these new options, you are never too young or too old to rethink retirement and start saving.