One of my first financial goals was to save for retirement so that I could retire early one day. I knew I wanted to have money in retirement to allow me to stop working and enjoy life. As soon as I started working after college, I invested in the company 401(k) plan and started an IRA. The problem with this goal is I didn't have any specific measurements for reaching this goal.

Over the next few years, I started to calculate how much money I would need in retirement and how much I needed to save each year to reach that goal. A couple of years ago I decided to come up with another goal of investing outside of my retirement plans in stocks that will pay a dividend income. I want to be able to have a large amount in stocks at retirement that will grow over time and pay a steady amount of dividend income.

I am proud to say we now have a solid plan that should allow us to retire in 15 years with a goal of $2 million in retirement assets as well as having the stock portion of those assets to payout $40,000 in dividend income at that time. We are well on our way towards our retirement goals and I would have to say there are two big reasons we are on track.

Starting early and often
I would have to say the biggest factor to our current investing success was starting to save for retirement as early as we did. It also helped to put in the maximum amounts in our retirement plans and IRA's when we started out. This year we will each put the maximum in our Roth IRA's accounts as well as put in enough money our retirement plans to get our company matching. We then put additional money into our dividend stock account to grow our dividend income for retirement.

Living below your means
The second most import factors for the success of our plan has been able to live on less than what we earn. This seems like a very easy concept except that I talk to people all the time who are living from paycheck to paycheck. There are some very smart people, even accountants, who can't keep from spending more than they make. We have been able to live below our means for many years and this is why we are well on our way towards retirement. Simply put, you have to have extra money each month to invest in order to save for your short term and long term goals such as retirement. We have done this by following a monthly budget and tracking our net worth on a regular basis.

You have to have a scorecard to see where you are in the game
What is your retirement plan?