Many people find they do not have the time or capability to travel the world during their working lives due to the time commitment of their job. However, retirement can be the perfect time for travel.
Polls show that most people wish to travel during retirement, whether it’s just continuing to go abroad once a year on holiday or something more substantial, such as traveling the world now that time commitments no longer restrict such plans.
Sadly, most people fail to save enough to be able to travel extensively during retirement and find themselves unable to fulfill their wanderlust.
Luckily, a little planning before retirement, using simple tools such as a pension calculator, can remedy this and ensure a retirement full of experiencing new countries and cultures.
Low-cost travel
Luckily, with the rise of low-cost travel and cheap airlines such as Ryanair and Easyjet, a retirement full of travel need not cost a fortune. For those serious about seeing the world, the first thing to do is to figure out how much you will need in retirement to meet your basic living expenses. Luckily there is a pension calculator that can help you forecast your living expenses during retirement. After you have figured out how much you will need to live on, it’s a good idea to do some research on travel costs and see how much the type of travel you would like to do in retirement costs.
Once you have a figure for how much you are likely to need in addition to your basic living costs in order to travel during retirement, experts advise adding an inflation rate of around 2-3 percent a year to that figure to be sure you will definitely have enough. Some pension calculators will do this for you automatically, but almost every pension calculator has the option to change the rates of inflation manually.
Affording travel
For those who want to go on longer trips abroad, or who are already retired and did not save enough, there are some tricks that can help you afford your travel costs. Some retirees going away on extended trips find that by renting out their home for the period they are gone, they can afford a trip they would otherwise be unable to afford. This is especially true for those who have no mortgage and are instead receiving the rent as income.
As the government allows for a certain amount of rent from a lodger to be received tax-free, many retirees have also reported taking in a lodger for a while to save up enough to travel. However, one of the easiest ways to plan for travel is simply planning ahead and using a pension calculator to ensure that enough is saved for retirement.
About the author: Gordon Rhyan from www.pensioncalculator.org writes news articles about pension planning and other retirement issues.