Relying solely on Social Security for retirement is not doable

Crunch the math. It’s not something that can be done. Besides, even if it could be done, you would be living a boring retirement. You would be making enough to survive and live at home all day. Maybe that’s okay with you, but most people want to leave the house and travel. However, as already alluded to, I’m not even convinced that Social Security will be enough for a person to be living a boring retirement. Even worse than the problem of boredom is the problem of financial worry.

So what else do you need to do? At the very least you should be putting some money away every month towards passive investing — index funds. For example, you can buy an S&P 500 index fund. This fund would mean that you are buying a portion of the 500 largest U.S. companies (stocks).

At the very least, having Social Security and a 401k/Roth IRA is a strategy. You need to have a strategy because hope is not a strategy. Not to mention, there’s always the possibility that Social Security won’t even be around in decades or if it is the benefits will be cut dramatically.

A minority of U.S. citizens still have a pension, which is even better — a trifecta (S.S. + 401k + Pension). The reason I say “still” is because a lot more people used to have pensions, but now they aren’t popular as they used to be.

To get practical, I’ve worked with people who were on Social Security; some were even working full-time. I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t want to be…