5 Reasons To Start an Online Business If You Are Retired or Getting Close To Retirement Age

You already know that at each stage of life, there are monumental decisions to be made.

As a child, they’re made by your caregivers. As you embark on adulthood, you will falter a bit as you find your pathways through life.

Fortunately, there’s things you can do to change direction and enjoy your senior years with fulfilling passions that give you a deep sense of peace and satisfaction.

I have found if you choose to build an online business, it will benefit you in many ways you may not have considered.

It Helps You Transition to Your Golden Years with Minimal Stress

Making the transition to retirement is sometimes a welcomed blessing and sometimes quite scary and intimidating. You may have been fully prepared for this or not prepared at all.

I lost a large portion of my retirement nest egg in the 2008 economic collapse, made some bone head decisions trying to recover from the losses, and as a result, I never fully recovered.

Now is not the time for us to beat ourselves up about career paths, how much money we saved or whether or not we achieved everything on our bucket list.

Now is the time to plan for your future!

Over the last 10 years there are many men and women who transition into their senior years in such an abrupt manner that it’s alarming and very uncomfortable. They go from being vibrant employees busy and engaged socially to jobless and isolated on a day-to-day basis.

It is demoralizing when a company pressures you or forces you to retire. No severance package can take away the stigma you feel after being released due to the company’s desire to hire fresh, less expensive and more youthful talent.

But when you learn about launching your own business online, suddenly it frees you up as the head of a new company – able to make all of the decisions for your own benefit and personal satisfaction.

By launching a new career in preparation for retirement or as a retiree online, you stay connected to the outside world. Best of all, you can work from anywhere, so you can travel and get out of the house with your laptop to work in a coffee shop if you want – you can work anywhere there’s power and an internet connection.

Did You Know It Gives You Time to Focus on Your Health

Time is a commodity we often fail to consider when we’re planning our lives and careers. It may have been too late, once you got started on your career path, to realize that it would not allow you the free time you need.

We need time to use for relaxation, to bond with friends and family, and to pour into our emotional and physical needs. Taking care of your health requires time, and if you’ve previously been burdened by a typical 9-5 job, then chances are, you’ve had to neglect other areas of your life.

When you embark on an online career, you have the power to make all decisions about when you work, and how much you work when compared to the rest of your life. If you want to continue working a 40-hour workweek, you have that ability.

But if you only want to work three days a week, or a total of four hours per day, then that’s your right, too. You don’t even have to set a time limit on it. You can work thirty hours one week, ten the next and none the third week if that’s what you want to do.

It’s all in how you plan your business, what you choose to delegate, what you can put on autopilot and so on.

For example, you might run a blog where the posts are ghostwritten by someone else and queued up by you to auto publish once every other day, without you having to be at the helm to watch it all unfold.

When you free yourself up from the harrowing 9-5 career you may have been locked into over the years, where you had to beg for time off, or give excuses and doctor’s notes if you missed a day, you’ll enjoy more time to devote to yourself.

If you want to sleep in and ensure you’re getting enough hours of sleep, you can. You can also work any time of the day you want – whether it’s early morning, afternoon, night or the wee morning hours.

If you’re in the middle of work and you want to make sure you get your exercise in, you can stop on a dime and go on an hour long walk. Or split your workday up and go play gold for four hours, if you choose to.

Never again will you be plagued by work stress or other stress to the degree you may have encountered it before. Now, you can take care of your mental health whenever you need to.

You’ll have time to stop and meditate or conduct deep breathing exercises. You can work in a beautiful park or garden – or on the beach halfway around the world if you want to.

If you feel stress building up, you can shut down your laptop and give your mind a rest. Take a nap. Watch a funny movie. Whatever you choose, you can take time to do it as your own online boss.

It Provides the Opportunity to Supplement Your Income

Many, if not most, men and women fail to save enough for retirement. Sometimes they save a little here and there, but it’s not enough to make ends meet. Other times they save enough for the life they currently have, but feel unable to afford the kind of life they want to live during retirement.

You might have dreams of retiring and being able to travel and see the world. In all of your years working for a company in a 9-5 job, you may not have been allowed more than two weeks per year (if that) for vacation.

Sometimes other things arise, such as wanting to pay for your child’s college or wedding, needing to fund an emergency medical procedure, having to make home repairs, or pay for a pet’s care.

When you become your own boss and begin working online, it supplements your retirement or social security benefits and allows you to do more in life – to carve out the kind of existence you want in your retirement years.

You can work as much or as little as you want to fund the things you want to do. You can grow your business into an empire if you want, or earn a little bit extra to get by – whatever your heart desires.

You can start with one business model and then branch out into other business models.

For example, you might start out as a blogger who earns affiliate commissions by recommending products to your target audience. But then you realize you have enough knowledge to develop your own information product, adding a second business branch to your income stream.

You might even go into more than one niche, tapping into the profit potential of a variety of things you’re interested in – including things you know by living it (such as aging or parenting), things you enjoy (such as golf or cooking), and things you can share based on your previous career as a health professional or teacher.

Working Online Allows You to Put Your Mark on the World in Your Way

As a teen in high school, going into college, you likely had big dreams of how you would change the world through your career. Whether it was in journalism or medicine – even engineering.

Most people want to leave their mark on the world in a way that benefits future generations. It doesn’t have to be anything Earth-shattering such as a breakthrough treatment or invention.

Just changing one life somewhere along the way, or making things easier, faster or better is an accomplishment to be proud of. Unfortunately, what often happens in the usual 9-5 corporate job is far from this scenario.

You show up that first day and are told what to do, how to do it, and how long it should be done. You rarely have any control over changes, even if they make sense, and the red tape you’d have to go through to make it happen is a deterrent.

When you start your own online career as an entrepreneur, you have the ability to connect with humanity and leave a legacy of your accomplishments. Your family can even inherit your business and carry on with your achievements if you (and they) want to.

You’ll feel a great sense of pride when your audience turns to you for help in whatever niche you’re guiding them in. For example, maybe you help people lose weight and watch as they’re able to do things they’ve never been able to do before.

Or perhaps your advice helps someone fix a different health problem they’ve suffered from. You might even bring more joy to someone’s life by leading them in mastering a certain hobby they enjoy.

This might be something like quilting or painting, golf or writing fiction. Just sharing your own journey can be enlightening and motivating to others while simultaneously allowing you to engage in activities you too enjoy.

There have probably been many instances in the past when you felt you knew how to teach someone a better way to do something. Maybe you didn’t have the time to guide them.

Or maybe you didn’t feel confident in letting them know, since you weren’t doing it professionally. But now you can. Now, you can hang your shingle as the bona fide expert and let them to come you for the assistance they’re willing to pay for.

No one should live a life where they have regrets about not having anything to show for all of their hard work. Sadly, this is what happens when many retire from a company.

You can put an end to it when you launch an online career.

It Lets You Discover Untapped Potential You Never Knew You Had

One of the unfortunate facts of life is that we continue evolving in our interests as the years go by, and most of the time, they simply get backburnered due to a lack of time or money.

Now, it’s time to dust off the topics you may have wondered about and bring them to the forefront so that you can see what your true potential is.

There are endless examples of this, but let’s take a couple to show you how it works.

Let’s say you spent forty years working for a company doing corporate work and found you really enjoyed cooking on the weekends or for special holiday events.

You never thought it could be a career, especially not online, but it can! There are many men and women who have started their own YouTube cooking channel, put together cookbooks to sell on Amazon and elsewhere, and even shipped baked goods to hungry customers!

You could slant it any way you like – such as a cooking style or geographic slant (Southern, Cajun, French, Italian, etc.). You could show people how to cook for a health issue like diabetes, or focus on vegetarian cooking.

You could even slant it on just one part of the meal, like desserts. There’s no end to how many slants you could have – cooking for one, low calorie cooking, and so on.

Another example might be someone who has always gardened in their spare time. You could replace gardening with anything – woodcarving, organizing their home, or whatever.

Anything that provides you with enjoyment or stress relief is a niche idea that you can bet others will be interested in, too. And you don’t have to already be an expert at any of the above examples.

People love to follow along with a beginner’s journey so it’s perfectly fine to blog and share your experiences as you learn to perfect something. Your audience will love seeing your progress and sharing theirs with you as they learn, too.

Working for yourself as an online entrepreneur means you’re going to be networking with people of all ages who are catering to the needs of their audience, too – and it’s a great way to make friends and enjoy the golden years of your life.