If you are nearing retirement or have recently left the job force, congratulations! However, to have a little extra income coming in, retirees sometimes need some business ideas to perform in their retirement years. In this post, we have found 20 ideas that require a low start-up capital to get off the ground.
Retirement Business Ideas
1. Grocery Sales
If you have the patience and personality for dealing with customers and staff, grocery sales are one of the better retirement business ideas. You can use a portion of your retirement benefits to set up a neighborhood grocery store to make money quickly. Don’t worry, starting a grocery store is much less costly than many belief. If you start small, you can always scale up from there as your business blooms.
2. Leverage Your Knowledge And Expertise
The most successful business ventures stem from areas in which you already experienced. If you were good at a job before you retired, or you’re already have some side passions that can be monetized, there is nothing wrong with using those skills to make money once you retire. Perhaps you had a passion for photography, painting, or craftsmanship. If you do something you love and are good at, it may not even feel like a job. If you can produce unique products, you can sell them on an easy-to-set-up Etsy store. (Open an Etsy shop and list your first 40 items free)
3. Buying A Franchise
If you have retired and were good at saving, you can invest in purchasing a franchise. This turns out to be easier than trying to figure out which business to start. Instead, you can buy into an already established, successful venture with a name recognition that will allow you to make money. When you buy into a franchise, you are getting into an all-in-one package.
Most franchises provide you with everything you need to get going assuming you pay the franchise start-up fees, but since they are already established, you will start getting their customer base coming in for service due to brand recognition.
4. Podcasting
Throughout your years in the workforce, you have likely gathered a lot of knowledge and experience. Chances are that there is a niche out there with an audience that is hungry for information about the knowledge you have.
If you start a podcast, perhaps about the industry you recently retired from, you can get the attention of people who are still in that profession to join your network of loyal listeners. As long as you provide interesting discussion points, listeners will return to get opinions and knowledge from an industry veteran.
5. Day Care
A particularly good idea for a business post-retirement for female retirees is to become a daycare proprietor. Instead of just sitting at home, you can use your home as a daycare center. Of course, this works only if you genuinely like being around and interacting with children. Needless to say, patience is imperative in this line of work, as you will need to wait till word gets around that you are good at what you do.
Many parents are happy to have their children watched in a smaller setting like home while they are away at work, and are willing to pay for a smaller environment rather than a large, likely more expensive daycare center.
6. Tour Guide Gig
If you have lived in your city for a while and know your way around, as well as many interesting historical details, there is money to be made as a tour guide. Tourists will visit your city with an interest in learning more about its customs and history, so sharing your knowledge about the place where you live and its culture can be a good money earner.
As long as you can get around the city in a mobile capacity, you can partner up with travel agencies who will happily take on another tour guide to help guide visitors on interesting, informative excursions.
7. Property Management
Since a lot of people are trying to lease or rent an unoccupied property, retirees can help by serving as property managers. As a property manager, your job will be to oversee the day-to-day operations of a particular property (or a set of them), whether they are residential or commercial.
The one benefit that is underplayed with property management is rent-free living. If you are a property manager of a small apartment complex, for instance, you will have the benefit of living at the property for free, especially in the case of it being residential. That alleviates the burdens of paying rent or making mortgage payments since most retirees do not have a lot of income for such things. Alleviating that expense while earning money seems like a win-win.
8. Blogging
You might be surprised to find out that blogging is one of the most lucrative post-retirement business ideas. Not only is blogging not concerned about gender, but you can also help other people by providing valuable information about any field of expertise. Your blog can be profitable if you select a niche in which there is a lot of interest.
On top of that, you can partner with affiliates who will provide you with links to their products, and when sales are made through someone who clicked your link you will earn a commission. Additional ideas in blogging are to write sponsored posts and monetize your blog through ad revenue with Google Adsense.
To start a blog you need a host (which you can get with just a few clicks with Hostgator), a domain name that you can register with Name.Com, a theme that you can obtain through Elegantthemes, and an email collection marketing tool that you can secure from AWeber.
9. Create Online Courses
If you have retired from a profession that there is a lot of interest in or have particular pain points that people in the industry always seem to need to overcome, you can create online courses and create a pathway for great passive income. By leveraging your experience from years of work, you can pour your knowledge into an online course that will help others learn from your experience.
They will gladly pay for such knowledge, meaning that you can monetize your wealth of knowledge. You can create courses on online through various educational platforms like Skillshare, Udemy, Thinkific, Teachable, LearnDash, Podia, Ruzuku, Podia, and Kajabi.
10. Ecommerce
If you don’t have the space to stock inventory, but want to make money as a retiree through selling physical products, your best route is eCommerce. It is important to remember that a large part of an eCommerce business’s revenue goes to marketing.
You can find products to sell through sites like AliExpress.com and Alibaba.com, then sell them through various other means at marked-up prices (Sign up for a free trial and enjoy 3 months of Shopify for $1/month on select plans.). You will need to promote your business for people to know about it, however. A good approach is to do so through paid Facebook ads.
11. Buy A Business
Starting a business from scratch, especially in retirement can be tough. But what if you didn’t have to start from the bottom? You can, in fact, purchase an existing business and continue its operations. As someone taking over the business, you will need to assume all of the business’s assets and processes. Because of this and the normal challenges that come with maintaining a business, it is important to take over a business that will be of a nature that you are already passionate about.
12. Poultry Farming
While it may seem like an odd retirement business idea, it is quite a viable business for retirees. The demand for poultry meat and eggs will always be there, so you can sell what you produce to others right from the comfort of your home. If you do not have sufficient space to house poultry, you can buy or lease land that does. While you can make good money, it does take substantial capital to get started.
13. Freelancing Services
One of the best ways to make money from home as a retiree is to go into your own freelancing business. People are always looking to outsource gigs, and you can pick them up to work on in your spare time. The great thing about this form of work is that you can generally work at your own pace, and you can realistically work from wherever you wish. How much you earn will be dependent on the quality of work you perform, your skill level, and the complexity of the projects handled. You can start finding freelancing work on sites like Fiverr and Upwork.
14. Become A Landlord
If you want to invest once and then make money over and over, you can rent out a property you own. The money you will need to invest upfront will be significant to acquire the property, and you will have a bank loan that will finance the mortgage payments. While someone rents, you can use their money to pay the monthly payments, and once the property is paid off, you pocket the rest of the earnings, making it a great source of (mostly) passive income
15. Designing Websites
Many businesses needed website designers to help to build and maintain their pathway to the world on the web. If you have any knowledge about website design, you can profit from building websites after you retire. Since online presence is required by virtually everyone who runs a business, web designers and developers are always in demand.
One of the best parts is that you don’t need any prior knowledge if you decide to explore this type of opportunity. There are tons of excellent courses available on YouTube through which you can learn everything from novice skills to expertly advanced techniques that can help you become a proficient web designer.
16. Pet Sitting
If you are retired and love the company of animals, you could be paid handsomely for watching animals for others for a fee. Some people may go into their office daily for work, while their animals are forced to stay alone. If you can host the animal or take care of it while they are gone, you could get paid for doing so.
Perhaps someone is taking a lengthy vacation, and they need an animal to be cared for in their absence. If you are available, you can take their pet into your home and take care of it while they are away. While you are watching the animal, it’s important to understand that you will be expected to perform certain duties that owners do regularly like going for walks, feeding, bathing, and cleaning up after the animal.
17. Consulting
Coming out of a career in any industry or business, you are equipped with years of knowledge that you can leverage to help other firms succeed in the future. If you retired from your career in a formal capacity if you can continue in a consultant capacity pending further training? As a certified consultant you can be of great assistance to the future of your industry, though in cases such as the medical sector, a retired medical practitioner can serve as an experienced hand for contemporary health professionals.
18. Virtual Assistant
What if you don’t want to start a new business, but you don’t mind being paid some extra money for assisting someone else? If that is something you are interested in, then you could explore being a virtual assistant. The idea is somewhat to being a freelancer, except you assist someone virtually with a set of tasks they need to be taken care of. This is great for you as you can perform the work and earn money from the comfort of your home, and it cuts down on expenses for the company paying you for your help.
19. Angel Investing
Perhaps you do not want to start your own business, but you want to sponsor others who do. You can become an angel investor which requires you to have some initial cash reserves. This is a bit of a risk because you don’t know that the business you are sponsoring will necessarily succeed. If it does, you will get sweet royalties for the rest of your days. Just make sure that all of the terms and conditions of your agreement with the company you are investing in are laid out ahead of time.
20. Life Coach
There are many people, especially younger ones who don’t have everything figured out and are facing challenges, sometimes on multiple fronts in their lives. They are seeking a direction to take in life, and as someone who has overcome your own trials and tribulations, you are experienced enough to offer them helpful advice.
To be this type of life coach, you need to make sure that you are trustworthy. Your clients will open you up to some personal details in their lives as a way to make you understand the areas in which they need help, and you must respect their privacy and be discreet.
Retirement Business Ideas, Final Thought
By now you have likely made up your mind about where you want to invest your retirement money and what kind of business you want to start once you leave the job market. The most essential piece of advice we can offer is to invest in a business that does not require a lot of cash to start up.
The best way to get recurring income is to invest in rental properties. If you don’t have much much capital to start out with, the best route to start with is to create a blog or put together an online course. Those take almost no investment capital and with time you could start making money that can then be invested in more expensive projects.
If you still want to discover more about ways of making money online, we suggest to you to check the next article of: TOP 10 Shopify Business Ideas To Tap Into The Ecommerce.
Frequently asked questions:
What can you do if you retire with no money saved?
The unfortunate truth is that far too many people retire from the workplace, but have no money. That means they need to continue to perform some sort of work that is suitable for a retiree. When you have earned enough to start up a business, you can invest in the type of business that suits you best.
What actions should you take 1 year before retirement?
Before you retire, you should check to make sure that you have saved enough that you can justify retiring. If not, then you should plan on what business you will start after your retirement comes. That way you have some time to plan and set things up.
What is the best retirement business to start?
If you are retired, you should enjoy your freedom, at least to a degree. If you start a business after retiring, it should be one that does not take up a lot of your time. It should also not need a lot of investment capital to start and one that yields to the skill set you already possess.
I’m Thomas, founder of Genie Dollars, a platform sharing proven strategies for making money online. With experience in affiliate marketing, print-on-demand, and freelance writing, I aim to inspire and guide others toward financial freedom through online entrepreneurship.
