Outliving Your Retirement Money

I’m going to start with a confession: I am one of those retirees who is living much longer than I expected. It’s great! I love getting older and all the good in my life! Except for one thing. What appeared to be ample retirement funds almost two decades ago, now seems insufficient. And running out of money in mid-retirement is not for me so I decided to open a new business to solve this problem.

Soap again?

At first I thought–very briefly—of restarting my old luxury soap business which I closed during the COVID shut-down. But “Nope”. No enthusiasm for soap now. As fun as soap making was when I started Pasadena Soaps years ago, circumstances are different today. Soap preferences have changed and postage/shipping costs have skyrocketed. Becoming the Soap Lady again is out of the question. So I kept looking around for ideas.

If a 10 year old can do it…

Whenever I checked on CNBC to see what the stock market was doing, I noticed short articles about people starting online businesses and becoming millionaires within a year or two. Sounded good to me. And they all said it was easy. One even claimed his 10 year old had started his own online business.

So I opened an online business selling Print-On-Demand (POD) stuff. It was fairly easy because I set it up using the POD company’s own pop-up store. I created the design and artwork for a couple of T-shirts, a couple of arty-prints (made with Adobe’s Firefly), a couple of decks of playing cards, a couple of jigsaw puzzles, a couple of coffee cups, a couple of…well, you get the idea. And not one thing sold. Nada. Nothing.

Fortunately, because it was POD, I had no actual inventory, just the designs for each item on a computer. If someone really bought one item from this hodge-podge of merchandise, it would be printed (say a buffalo design on a coffee cup) and then shipped directly from the printer to my customer.

But zero sales didn’t sit well with me. Or my bank account.

Time to Get Serious About Research

YouTube turned out to be a gold mine of information about starting an online business. Better than CNBC’s snappy success stories. The main idea in the many videos I watched was that online marketing works if you have a niche product, preferably one where there is growth. I had already decided that the Southwest was a theme I would like to use, but what product?

In my failed online hodge-podge store, I had liked creating the images for two puzzles, so I did market research about jigsaw puzzles – which, by the way, I enjoy doing. It was fairly good news. Anticipated annual growth of 4% plus a major trend toward more family activities that minimized screen time. Activities like doing jigsaw puzzles as a family.

Skipping Ahead to Today

I will not terrify you with the challenges of learning new e-commerce software to set up my own online business, instead of using the POD pop-up. That 10 year old must have been a tech genius! I, non-genius, have managed to open a jigsaw puzzle business with a theme of Southwest images. (Plus 3 pirates.) It’s called SeaSun Puzzles. The image at the top of this page is from the site, as is this one:

Happily, there have been a few sales. And I hope you take a minute to look at it.

While I wouldn’t necessarily suggest an online business if you are concerned about generating more income in retirement, it has turned out to be a good solution for me so far. I would definitely recommend, however, that you go to YouTube to do research before you launch a “retirement business” of any kind. Lots of good information from a variety of sources and the more information you gather the greater your chances of success.

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