Retirement planning is one of those tricky subjects that leads to millions of finance articles and $1,000 seminars dedicated to talking about (preying upon?) the insecurities of individuals as they enter an age in which they can’t rely on their labor anymore and must rely on a combination of Social Security, pensions, and ownership interests to get the pills paid.

To be honest, the real formula for retirement is this: “You can safely retire once you can safely generate 125% of the amount of money that you project you will spend in a given year.” The extra 25% difference accounts for unexpected expenses that show up and give you a nice margin of safety to reinvest dividends or whatever it may be so that you can make sure that you spend your later years skating on the thick part of the ice (after all, once you enter thin ice territory, … Read the rest of this article!