You won’t ever get rich fetching someone else’s coffee. Heck, you probably won’t wind up with enough to retire. It’s time to take responsibility for our own retirement planning. The best starting point is realizing just what retirement planning isn’t.

Retirement planning isn’t waiting for an inheritance.

You can’t expect your parents to be responsible for your retirement — their life expectancy is getting longer everyday. Mom and Dad will be using more of their retirement savings themselves. I know more than a few people who are not necessarily waiting for their parents to fall into the grave, but who are expecting a few dollars down the road. This just isn’t a realistic expectation: even if your inheritance is in the hundreds of thousands of dollars range, you still probably won’t have enough to retire on.

Retirement planning isn’t a house.

Paying your mortgage should definitely be a priority. But, no matter how much equity you build up in your home, it’s unlikely that you’ll be able to pull enough cash out to cover your retirement — even if the housing market turns around and your house’s value skyrockets.

Retirement planning isn’t working for “the Man” for forty years.

Pension plans are rapidly becoming a thing of the past. Any guarantees that your employer will keep you on as long as you want are long gone. And, personally, I don’t think that I’ll make enough money punching a clock to cover years and years of retirement, health care costs and presents for the grandkids. It’s time to start thinking about other income streams. We can talk about real estate, stocks or even selling random junk on eBay. No matter what other income sources appeal to you, though, investing time and money in creating income streams is the real secret to retirement planning.

So, what is retirement planning?

There is, unfortunately, no perfect retirement plan that will work for every single one of us. We have to make the effort to find options that work for us — often going far beyond allowing our path to be guided just by eliminating options. Instead, we must set goals, decide our preferred methods for earning additional income and invest time, effort and even money to ensure that, in the long run, we wind up with more money. We have to do the research ourselves, instead of relying on what seems like a great deal. After all, if a retirement plan seems to be too good to be true, it probably is.