A ton of personal finance information awaits anyone with an interest, but we need a frame of reference to even begin understanding all of that information in the first place. Let’s take 10 minutes to talk about what “retirement” really means, and how that applies to financial independence and savings.

Retirement is simply the point where our resources can cover our financial needs for the rest of our lives, without us working any more. That’s it. There’s no special age, there’s no magic number, and there’s no “one right way” to calculate when people should retire if they want to. While a lot of factors contribute to figuring out retirement (such as how long we’ll live and how much we need), retirement is simply the point where we decide that we can afford to quit working, if we want to.