Retirement

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The Blue Zone website campaigns for people to live a healthy lifestyle. It requires that people reduce their stress levels, increase their consumption of healthy foods while at the same time reducing their consumption of unhealthy ones. Other habits that are encouraged are regular medical checkup, and proper dental care and skin care. Living within the standards laid by the website looks almost impossible. I don’t see myself being able to live at my current status. Specifically, in the future, I expect pollution levels to increase and thereby negatively impact my health and the possibility of aging to anything very high.

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I have a life expectancy of 81 years. This in my opinion is relatively high. The main factors that have contributed to the high life expectancy are my intake of healthy foods, excising and low stress levels. On the other hand, intake of certain foods has negatively impacted my health. I take red meat daily which is bad for my health. According to the website, I have also accrued a total of 4.6 years from my life habits. Results also show that I am capable of living another 23 years free of cancer. This to me implies that by the time I retire, I am likely to either diabetic, or have cancer or heart disease. To me, life is likely to be rather difficult after retirement.

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I plan to retire at the age of 60 years. This is to give me enough time to save for my retirement. At my retirement, I want to be able to live a life that is relatively similar to my working years. I also intend to get married and raise a decent family. For it to be easy, I would like to educate all my children during my working years. I also think that most people have no options. At the age of sixty, I will have completed the hardest part of raising my family.

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I am currently unemployed. I used a salary of $60,000 for my calculations. For me to be able to continue with my current lifestyle, I am required to start saving a total of $14,280 annually towards my retirement. In my opinion, this is close to a quarter of my salary. This will be very hard to maintain. It seems that saving towards my retirement will be very hard. This will be especially so during the time when I will be raising my family.

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The whole concept makes being independent rather scary. I am expected to live a lifestyle that is way above my capabilities. I also think it would be rather difficult and limiting to adopt all the requirements of the Blue Zone website. I would however be able to change certain aspects of my life. I can afford to exercise a few times more each week. I would also be able to reduce the number of times I take red meat and in its place put white meat. Raising a reasonable amount of money for my retirement is rather difficult. It is likely to scoop close to 25 % of my total income each year. I would suggest getting other means of securing an income. The suggestion would be to invest as much as I can into areas like real estate that are likely to become a source of income during later years of my life.