Imagine that you are forty years old and that you have fifteen thousand dollars saved up that you would like to put to work for your future retirement. Let's say you put that into a well diversified portfolio, with shares in aggressive growth, long-term growth and so on. You might, with a very generous estimation, be able to beat the market and make ten percent each year on your portfolio. Without getting into the complex algorithms required to project your future portfolio value, you would probably end up with just over $35,000 after twenty years of ten percent annual growth. This would particularly be the case if you didn't add anything to your investment portfolio over that period of time.

So you started with $15,000 and twenty years later you have $35,000. Your money did good work and more than doubled itself! Hooray!

Of course, this situation presupposes that the stock market doesn't crash, the companies you are invested in don't fold, and that you don't have a bad year.

But take another look here. Is $35,000 enough money to live off of after you retire? Of course not. Even with your lovely social security payment and/or your company's pension, you're not going to make it past two or maybe three years.

Wait! Let's not forget, some might say, about the wonderful 401k plans that many companies offer. These plans provide that the company will match your contributions to the retirement plan, to a certain limit. So let's say your $15,000 went into a 401k and the company matched it. Maybe you now have $80,000 for retirement. Oh heck, let's just say you have $100,000.

But that's still not enough! Experts say that a good nest egg is at least one million dollars, so the traditional idea of saving and getting and maintaining a diverse portfolio really doesn't work for most people.

Instead, investing in real estate will be the best way to plan for your retirement. Sure, it took us kind of a little while to get to this point, but now hopefully readers can see just how important it is to find something other than the traditional ways of preparing for retirement.

Let's take another walk into imagination.

Your forty. You have $15,000 to invest toward your retirement which is twenty to twenty-five years off. You look around your area and find a condo that is rented out to students year-round. You buy the condo with your $15,000 down payment and with rent money, the condo pays for itself. In fact, it pays for itself with a little left over.

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