Not at all. However, your strategy will depend on a few important factors. For example, are you starting at retirement from scratch, meaning you have nothing saved? Or you have a significant amount saved and invested elsewhere and just thinking or re-allocating it?
Generally, it is never late to start in the stock market but as in investor a young person starting investing has a lot of time on his/her side and time is your friend. If you are already in retirement, you do not have much time – but that also depends where are you ate retirement – just retired or in mid retirement? If you just retired, it is still good as you may have another 10 to 20 years in front of you. And that is a good time to start and invest. However, I personally would look for safe but aggressive methods to boost your income from your investment and reinvest it unless you need it to pay your bills.
A good way is to use cash secured puts and covered calls to generate additional income on your holdings. Do not listen to people telling you that options are risky. It is not true. The risk is in underlying stock, not options. So whether you use options or not, you still have the same risk but options offer you a better protection compared to holding just stocks.
For example, when you sell cash secured puts, you always have money to buy the stock. And if you sell puts against a stock you want to buy anyway, then you have nothing to lose but buy cheaper than when buying a stock out right.
Example: Trade A and B want to buy a stock ABC at $30 a share. A trader A buys 100 shares of the stock immediately at $30 a share. Trader B sells 1 contract of cash secured put with 28 strike price and collects $40 income from selling the put.
The stock dipped to 26 a share at expiration.
The trader A is sitting on a loss $400 dollars ($30 – $26 = $4 * 100 = $400) , while trader B just bought in 100 shares by being assigned at 28 a share. His loss is only $160 a share ($28 assignment – 0.40 received premium = $27.60 cost base – $26 = $1.60 * 100 shares = $160). And once you get assigned, you can start selling covered calls and generate more income.
So, as you can see, it is not the options which carry the risk, it is the stock. Options can actually help you to lower that risk.
And if you choose high quality dividend growth stocks, you can achieve triple income from your investments: dividends, puts premiums, and calls premiums.
And it is never late for this to implement.
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