Retirement should be a great time in our lives. The dawn of a new age that should hold just as much promise as any other of the great land marks in our lives.

Just as the eighteenth and twenty first birthdays are packed full of excitement and anticipation of impending adulthood, so to the day of ones retiring is loaded with excitement about the opportunity to pursue your interests and spend more time with loved ones, as well as certain amount of sorrow about leaving behind your career, which these days is such a large part of how we define ourselves.

The one emotion that all but the very fortunate among us is sure to feel upon retirement is anxiety. A degree of nervous uncertainty about whether the financial arrangements we made for our later years will indeed be sufficient to see us through; particularly in the traumatic circumstance we find ourselves living in.

Several disparate issues combine to make the currently climate the most challenging for people to people to retire into that this working generation has ever seen. A combination of increased life spans, a decrease in benefits from employers to help us through these tough years, lower returns from our investments as the financial markets writhe in recession, and an ever-increasing cost of living all play significant roles.

As with most things in life, the key to having sufficient retiring income is planning. In recent years the burden of retirement planning has shifted from governments and corporations firmly towards the individual.

The first thing to do is to figure out how much you are likely to require, to have the sort of retirement you would like. Many of our current expenses will have changed for the better by then.

For example, it is hoped by most that they would have paid off mortgages and other home loans by then. We are also unlikely to need more than a single, fuel-efficient car in our latter years. Maybe not even that if we can live with public transport

These things should be set against the rise in other costs. Perhaps more holidays, or greater spending on hobbies.

The Internet is full of retirement income calculators and other sites with useful advice on how to maximise your money, but one figure you might like to keep in mind is that to have a retirement income of $60000, you would need to have saved a nest egg of around $1 Million!

As you can imagine, the secret to accumulating a nest egg of these proportions is to start saving as early as possible and to be realistic about the amount of your monthly income you need to be setting aside.

Perhaps the most realistic opinion is to make what you have go a little bit further by finding ways of making money during retirement.

Have a look at your interests and see if there are any moneymaking possibilities there. If you enjoy taking great photographs, for example, why not buy a canon digital powershot camera and take some picture worthy of selling to others?