Retirement Quotes to Inspire You to Greater Heights

Drive a Free Car

Michel de Montaigne once said, "I quote others only the better to express myself."

"I shall never be ashamed to quote a bad author," claimed Seneca the Younger, "if what he says is good."

Not to be outdone, Samuel Johnson said, "Quotation is the highest compliment you can pay to an author."

Indeed, sensational retirement quotations add spice to your conversations, are easy to remember, represent brilliant wisdom, remind you humorously of your somewhat questionable existence, motivate you to greater accomplishments, or just plainly lighten your day.

Here are a few retirment quotes from the Sensational Quotes Website that can be used as retirement resources or in your retirement letters :

#6 of Top-10 Retirement Quotes

Retirement is like a long vacation in Las Vegas. The goal is to enjoy it the fullest, but not so fully that you run out of money.
- Jonathan Clements

#7 of Top-10 Retirement Quotations

Retirement is the beginning of life - not the end.
- from the international bestseller How to Retire Happy, Wild, and Free

#8 of Top-10 Retirement Quotes

Preparation for old age should begin not later than one's teens. A life which is empty of purpose until 65 will not suddenly become filled on retirement.
- Arthur E. Morgan

#9 of Top-10 Retirement Quotations

Teacher's Retirement Motto: I Used to Teach. Now I Have No Class.
- Unknown wise retiree

NOTE: For a great selection of retirement quotes and retirement sayings, go to the Retirement Quotes Webpage at The Joy of Not Working Website by Ernie Zelinski:

Retirement Quotes at The Joy of Not Working

I Was Fired By The Airlines, So This Is My Revenge! This Angry Ex-travel
Agent Will Reveal The Deepest, Darkest Secrets Of The Airline Industry
To Show How You Can Obtain Tickets At Ridiculously Low Costs!

Privatization of Social Security for Dummies

This was my post as a comment to an article called Obama Ignores Reality of Social Security where the writer was advocating the privatiztion of the American Social Security System.

I agree that the American Social Security problem is in deep trouble and the biggest problem is that there is no actual “Trust Fund” set aside but an I.O.U. from the Federal Government which has borrowed the funds for its daily operations. This would be okay if the Government wasn’t bankrupt big-time.

In my opinion, the answer is not privatization, however. The reasons is that corporations are not to be trusted any more than governments when it comes to your retirement income.

The answer is to follow the model of the Canadian Pension Plan (CPP), which is actually run by the Canadian Federal Government but which has actual monies set aside in a separate fund. This fund is UNTOUCHABLE in that it can’t be used for daily government operations. The CPP fund is run by professional advisors and has invested in stocks, bonds, and even in water utilities both in Britain and New Zealand. The CPP board also raised the contributions that Canadians must make dramatically in the last few years so that the fund will be able to pay Canadian retirees for many decades.

Ernie J. Zelinski
Author of How to Retire Happy, Wild, and Free
(Over 125,000 copies sold and published in 9 languages)
and The Joy of Not Working
(Over 250,000 copies sold and published in 17 languages)

As an aside here is another tidbit I posted in an article called Social Security Is a Secure Way to Find Great Pleasure from Being Terribly Deceived.

In February 2005 then President George W. Bush attempted to explain Social Security to Americans. This is what Bush said:

"Some in our country think Social Security is a trust fund - in other words, there's a pile of money being accumulated. That's simply not true. The money - payroll taxes going into Social Security are spent. They're spent on benefits and they're spent on government programs. There is no trust We're on the ultimate pay-as-you-go system - what goes in comes out. And so, starting in 2018, what's going in - what's coming out is greater than what's going in."

Here are some Retirement Quotations for Smart People to place Retirement in Perspective:

I used to have dreams that I died at my desk. Now that I've retired, I don't have those dreams anymore.
- Anon

One week into retirement, you'll be so damned bored that you'll want to stick bicycle
spokes into your eyes. You'll probably opt to look for another job or start another company. Kinda defeats the purpose of waiting [for retirement], doesn't it.
- Timothy Ferris in The 4-Hour Workweek

Why shouldn't retirees expect some reduction in Social Security and Medicare benefits, and soon? Before we retired, or will retire, we lived beyond our means by voting for those congressmen who would keep taxes low and borrow from the trust funds to pay government bills. Woe to the politician who would ask us to fully pay the taxes necessary for the services we expected from government. This large accumulated debt to the funds is coming due. So we have an obligation to help pay it off by accepting less from them or paying higher taxes on our retirement income. As retirees, we have no right to just pass our debt off on our kids. We certainly helped create it and should help pay it off.
— Werner Gruhl, Columbia

The Ideal Retirement Plan: "Marry an old rich broad and wait for her to die."
- Ivan Wilson (commenting on an online article about retirment.)

We have a manufactured vision of what retirement is, and that doesn't necessarily correlate with reality. Unless you have a well-thought-out scenario, you're going to be in for a shock at retirement.
- Paul Allen, 64, a self-employed software developer in Dallas

Investing in the Stock Market for Early Retirement Is for Dummies

This item was recently posted on an article called How to Retire Early in 5 Easy Steps:

4. INVEST: The next step is to invest it; the return is worth it. You can double your money in as little as 20 years with a mere 5% return. Considering that the average return of a stock portfolio is around 9% over a ten-year period, it is reasonable to assume that you could net more than double your money in ten years, allowing you to retire that much sooner. As such, not investing your savings, even if it is just invested in a high-yield savings account, is tantamount to throwing away money.

This was the comment that I placed after the article:

I believe your comment "Considering that the average return of a stock portfolio is around 9% over a ten-year period," is misleading and simply not true. Investing in the stock market will not help people retire early. It will leave them begging for a retirement job.

I have seen figures like this used a lot by financial advisors, who have nothing but their own self-interests in mind.

This comes from a recent article called You Wasted the Last 10 Years of Your Life:

"If you think the stock market is the road to a comfortable early retirement, you're wrong. You may have thought about cashing in on the long-term average annual returns of 7% (postinflation) you heard you could get from investing in stocks, but I'm here to tell you to think again.

In the past decade, the SPDR S&P 500 ETF (NYSE: SPY), an exchange-traded fund (ETF) designed to track the broad U.S. stock market, returned an amazing -1.4% per year. That's right, negative, as in less than zero. Including dividends. That's a long way from 7%."

So, based on these figures, one would have been better off to place money in a savings account or even in one's mattress than investing in the stock market."

I am all for early retirement and believe that one can retire comfortably by the age of 60 but relying on the stock market - as on Social Security - is for dummies.

Ernie J. Zelinski
Author of How to Retire Happy, Wild, and Free
(Over 125,000 copies sold and published in 9 languages)
http://www.retirement-quotes.com
and The Joy of Not Working
(Over 250,000 copies sold and published in 17 languages)

In response to another article called Debt Is the Number One Killer of Early Retirement Dreams, I posted this comment:

You state, "Debt is the number one killer of early retirement dreams."

I disagree with you.

You should have said, "Death is the number one killer of early retirement dreams."

Many people end up dying on the job before they are able to take early or late retirement.

On the other hand, I agree with you that debt is detrimental to retirement. If you are retiring with any debt, you aren't ready for retirement.

Note: The article mentioned on the top is available at How to Retire Early