Planning Plan B

Despite my best planning and research I am aware that my plan to retire at 45 can go up in smoke due to any number of different variables such as inflation or investment performance. So it occurs to me that perhaps a Plan B would be in order. So let's look at my options.

1) Push off retirement

This is the easiest of the options to put into place. If I'm checking my numbers when I'm five years out and things are not looking good I can always push back the date by a year or two. This would allow for some additional savings and if I'm lucky a bit more time to get the kid out the front door for good.

2) Scale back retirement

In my particular case I'm not putting a lot of fat into my retirement plans anyways so I'm not comfortable cutting back on anything. Yet this is an option for some people if you are close to your goal and you have a fair amount of padding in your retirement plan calculations (for example you have 10% extra spending per year and you are using a 4% inflation rate).

3) Change plans to a semi-early retirement

In this case I would do the calculations to determine my absolute minimum required for basic living and then pick up any work I would like to fund the extras like a trip. This option has the most appeal personally, since I was thinking of doing something like 'work' when I'm retired anyways. In this case, the extra money I would earn would just be targeted towards the luxury items. The draw back to this option is the increased requirement for doing something to earn some extra income rather than being able to do work without any requirement for extra income in a true early retirement.

Those are perhaps the more obvious options, but if you have another idea please share by leaving a comment.