You Should Never Give Up is for readers who have tried almost everything, but still cant get answers.

DUBLIN (PRWEB) October 30, 2019

Sheila Mo Cierpikowskas book You Should Never Give Up #MyTestimonyVol1 ($12.49, paperback, 9781498477055; $5.99, e-book, 9781498477062), is available for purchase.

You Should Never Give Up is for readers who have tried almost everything, but still cant get answers. They are tired of making the same mistakes. They have faith in God, but it seems that their prayers are in vain and their back is against the wall. This book contains author Sheila Cierpikowskas testimony of an intelligent faith that she learned from the Universal Church. This book is a message of practical advice that will guide readers to overcome those inner battles and complexes solely to receive the Power of the Holy Spirit to guide you if they accept.

Sheila Mo Cierpikowska is an entrepreneur and she achieved her Post Graduate award in entrepreneurship at the University College Dublin in Ireland. She is the mother of two kids, Latoya and Antonio. She resides in Dublin with her husband, Krzysztof Cierpikowski.

Xulon Press, a division of Salem Media Group, is the worlds largest Christian self-publisher, with more than 12,000 titles published to date. You Should Never Give Up #MyTestimonyVol1 is available online through xulonpress.com/bookstore, amazon.com, and barnesandnoble.com.

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Self Help Book Encourages Readers to Trust God to Change the Story of Their Lives - PR Web

The most common complaint I hear from clients about dating is that its exhausting. Whether people are spending hours scrolling through apps, writing unanswered messages, dealing with last-minute date cancellations, or experiencing the all-too-common phenomenon of ghosting, the effects are often frustration, fatigue, and even despair.

Source: Source: Matheus Ferrero.

Part of this is because of the unprecedented amount of time and energy that people can now spend online dating. After all, when in the past could we spend hours a day sifting through potential partners? While dating apps are not the only way to meet people, their ubiquity has raised the appearance of abundance while also decreasing the likelihood that people will settle on a partner or partners.

One solution is to engage in intuitive dating. Like intuitive eating, the concept is simple but often requires large-scale internal and behavioral changes. However, the payoff is feeling more peace and pleasure in datingas well as upping your chances to meet the best possible partner/s for you. Read on for five ways to engage in this practice.

Id love to hear from you on this topic. Have you experienced dating burnout? What are your ideas for integrating more intuition, intention, and pleasure into your dating life?

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Intuitive Dating: Center Self-Care and Avoid Burnout - Psychology Today

The real work begins after you start your online business.

November1, 20195 min read

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

These days, your online platform is crucial. Consumers trust brands more readily if they have an online presence, and per Vox, top tier influencers with substantial followings are now raking in a whopping $100,000 persponsored post. Online platforms are as lucrative as they areimportant for customer engagement. And, believe it or not, theyre continuing to grow.

According to Brand Watch, even though there are 3.5 billion social media users in the world, another newcomer creates an account every 6.4 seconds. With almost everyone online -- and with that number growing daily -- the sheer potential of your online platform for building a business or sharing your message should not be taken lightly.

Related: 8 Crucial Steps You Need to Take Before Starting an OnlineBusiness

But, there is one potential disadvantage of having everyone online: the competition is fierce. Everyone is vying for the engagement of an audience. So, how do you start an online business and scale your online platform so your content can perform and convert followers to customers? Here are some ideas:

It can be discouraging when you keep posting content and nothing seems to take off. The secret is to justkeep going! Case Kenny is the host of the New Mindset, Who Dis? podcast. It found success initially, but several months in, he wasnt hitting the download numbers he was looking for, which was frustrating for him. Now, his podcast has hit close to 2 million downloads.

I considered calling it quits. Fortunately, I didn't, I put my head down and kept publishing, fine-tuning my voice and message and in October 2018, the podcast blew up. It ranked #26 in the world on the charts and #8 in the world as a self-help podcast, Kenny shared. Its similar to what Gary Vaynerchuk says frequently: Youre only one piece of content away from what you want to happen happening. The more content you put out, the more likely you are to create that one thing that goes viral and scales your platform.

Peter Pru, the founder of ECommerce Empire Builders, learned all about scaling an online ecommerce platform through dropshipping. It takes money to make money, Pru said. Heencourages anyone who needs to work part-time or even a full-time job to fund their business to do it. Almost every startup needs money to begin, so you have to be willing to do what it takes to earn that money so you can invest in yourself and your business.

Related: 4 Ways Facebook Can Help You Start an Online Business

Investing in a publicist who can get you media exposure or a social media strategist who can help grow your platform is a great use of funds to get you started. Whatever you do, do not invest in buying fake followers. These will hurt your engagement rate and can be very obvious to new potential followers who can come across your page.

Whichever online platforms you use, its crucial to take stock on whats working and what isnt. Nowadays, there are a number of tracking or analysis tools to help you determine which type of content yields the highest engagement rate. The first element to look at is which social media pages drive the most traffic to your website. Hootsuite recommends using Google Analytics to evaluate this. For example, if your Instagram is sending 18 followers a day to your page but your YouTube is only sending three, you know to focus more effort on Instagram.

Instagram has a built-in feature for business pages that can tell you how well your post does. When you click View Insights on a certain post, youll be able to see the number of impressions and compare it to the number of engagements (likes and comments). Perhaps photos with your face perform better than quote pictures you make in Canva, or maybe videos bring in more comments than just photographs. The next step is to use the data you derive from these analytics to pivot in your strategies moving forward, so youre always doing what drives the most engagement.

Related: Start an Online Business, Then Get Influencers to Promote Your Brand

A key part of scaling your platform further -- especially once youre confident on what content performs best -- is heightening your contents exposure to other audiences. Finding creators who post similar content to what you post is a great way to expand your reach. Consider reaching out to other influencers on theplatform you use most frequently and asking to collaborate or share each others posts.

A good rule of thumb here is to approach other creators with a similar number of followers to you so that you can do more of a trade rather than paying for the exposure. The Social Media Examiner shares that some potential opportunities for these collaborations include co-created content or product co-branding, such as launching a joint online course with another creator who shares the same expertise that you do.

Scaling an online platform is more of an art than a science, but these must-know secrets will help you direct your strategies so you can start scaling more, faster.

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4 Secrets to Starting a Business and Scaling an Online Platform - Entrepreneur

Time with your thoughts sans social distractions can also be restorative, build your confidence and make it easier for you to maintain boundaries, Ms. Roberts said. In addition, it can boost productivity, engagement with others and creativity, and a study published in Current Directions in Psychological Science found that brainstorming was enhanced when participants alternated between brainstorming alone and with a group.

In a twist on the golden rule: treat yourself as you would treat others. Dont flake. Be open to exploring new interests. Make space in your life and put in the time, even if its just spending 30 minutes a week reading at a cafe.

If youre just getting started, take small steps, Dr. Grice suggests. Time spent alone is a great opportunity to explore new interests, but it doesnt mean you have to totally push yourself outside of your comfort zone. And if the thought of spending time alone is especially stressful or triggering, that could be an important sign that you may need professional support, Dr. Grice adds.

But if youre at a loss as to how to jump in, plan out something that you know that you will enjoy doing, maybe something that helps you feel more productive, or helps you be more relaxed, Dr. Nguyen said.

If youre having an especially hard time listening to the thoughts inside your head, journaling can be a great way of working through and evaluating those emotions, Ms. Roberts said. And though its tempting, try not to be on your phone, because its too big of a distraction. Instead, Dr. Coplan suggests reading, making crafts, going to a movie, grabbing a meal, visiting a park, trying to learn a new skill or any one of the infinite options available besides making your alone time about other people and obsessively checking social media.

Ultimately, each person will have a different ideal balance between how much time they spend alone and with others, but nobody is going to be optimally served by doing only one or the other, he said.

Above all, the most important step in being able to reap the benefits of time alone is simple, Dr. Nguyen said: Take the opportunity to say, This is the time where I can give something to myself, and just endorse that, in this moment, you are your first choice.

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Why You Should Find Time to Be Alone With Yourself - The New York Times

In a two-page spread featured early on in Growing up Female, a photography book by Abigail Heyman, from 1974, two black-and-white pictures are laid out side by side. The left-hand photo shows a reflection of a little girl, from the shoulders up, gazing at herself in a bathroom mirror. The child, who is perhaps four or five, with dark, wide-set eyes and a pixie haircut, is separated from her likeness by a counter, whose white-tiled expanse is littered with a variety of beauty products: perfume bottles, creams, and soaps. These quotidian markers of feminine routine are accompanied by an element of fantasy; gazing at herself, the little girl stretches a slinky into a makeshift tiara atop her head. Seemingly mesmerized by her own image, she is captured at the innocent early stages of preoccupation with womanly self-presentation and self-making. On the spreads right-hand side, meanwhile, is a self-portrait of Heyman in a mirror, though it is cut off not at the shoulders but at the necka composition more evocative of a decapitated head than of a classical bust. In the photo, Heyman is in her early thirties, and her face, under a halo of messy hair, wears a worried expression. Like her young counterpart, she is separated from her image by beauty products, but, here, they read less as tools of pleasurable transformation and more as objects that split a woman from her self, a divide echoed by an ugly crack that runs the length of the wall on which the mirror hangs. There is no sense of wonder here, only a drab reality, thick with dread. On the page, above the picture of the little girl, there is a handwritten quote: My aunt used to say, Youre a pretty girl. Youll do well. Set next to Heymans bleak self-portrait, this sentence seems less like a reassuring truism and more like a witchs curse.

Ashley in Mirror, 1973.

Self-Portrait, 1971.

Fantasy and reality, joy and oppression, hope and difficulty: the two images present contrasting but complementary angles from which to look at the everyday business of being a woman, which Heyman sought to document in all its complexity. Growing up Female was a hit when it was published, selling more than thirty-five thousand copies and serving as a de-facto companion piece to one of the bibles of American second-wave feminism, Our Bodies, Ourselves, from 1970, an instructional guide whose direct, unembarrassed approach to womens health and sexualityand womens right to make decisions regarding their bodieswas positively revolutionary. Although Heymans book was a collection of fine-art photographs, it, too, aimed to provide women with a rousing reaffirmation of their own corporeal and emotional experiences, many of which had historically been hidden or diminished. Heymans work is the perfect illustration of the personal is political, the Paris-based photo historian and curator Clara Bouveresse told me, when I spoke to her recently on the phone. Its like reading a private and intimate diary, but its feminist issues have a collective dimension.

Indian Teenager, 1971.

Football Player, 1972.

Black Girl-White Doll, 1972.

Bouveresse, who, earlier this year, curated a historical show of women in the seventies who photographed other women for the Arles photo festival, in which Heymans work was included, encountered Growing up Female by chance. She was doing research at the Mana Contemporary art center in New Jersey, which houses many photographic archives, when she came upon a box that contained Heymans work. The photographer, who died in 2013, at the age of seventy, never replicated the initial success of Growing up Female. Between 1974 and 1981, she was part of the prestigious photographers co-operative Magnum, but after she left it, and with feminist photography losing its cultural urgency as the eighties drew to an end, her work gradually sank into obscurity. Bouveresse, however, was struck by the force of the pictures she encountered, and by their still-fresh depiction of womens lives, caught between self-expression and the circumscribed, structurally determined roles they are often, even today, relegated to. She was also impressed by the arresting combination of written text and images that make up the book. Some of the included utterances were the photographers own, and some were solicited from her friends and acquaintances. According to Bouveresse, this blurriness of authorship was intentionalmaking a particular personal experience into one that many women could identify with and claim, to greater collective impact.

A spread from Growing Up Female.

At left, Factory Lunch, 1973; at right, August 26, Man-Children, 1971.

Heymans images are specific to a distinct place and timethe America of the late sixties and early seventies, roiled by the feminist revolution and other protest movements, yet caught in the grip of earlier, more conservative ideologies. In other ways, however, these humanistic photos still feel relevant to our time. In several images, each taken in a different location and context, a woman is seen with her legs spread open. A stripper, her head and face obscured and her genitalia agape, performs a dance for a row of silent, gazing men; a new mother, her legs tented wide under surgical fabric, gives birth. (At first I didnt want my husband in the delivery room because I didnt want him to see me that exposed. And I was afraid he would never want to make love with me again, the accompanying text says.) Heyman herself is represented, too: Nothing ever made me feel more like a sex object than going through an abortion alone, she writes, the text hovering above an image of the dark triangle of her own legs, between which a doctor stands, performing the newly legal procedure.

Confused Army, 1971.

Lingerie Shop, 1972.

Women, Heyman showed, are always at risk of being seen as an abstractionsomething less than fully human. In such a context, photography itself becomes a feminist act. In the act of composing these images, some of which dealt with private, taboo moments that had rarely, if ever, figured in the world of fine photography, Heyman reclaimed not just her own humanity but that of her subjects as well. In one image, a woman lies on her back, naked from the waist down, save for her socks, interacting genially with a group of fellow-women, who crowd encouragingly around her. In a womans gynecological self-help group I got to know my bodyand myselfbetter, the text on the page opposite the photo reads. Have you ever looked at your own cervix? If a woman is exposed here, it is peaceably, unashamedly, painlessly, for her own education and that of other women. Looking at this image, it occurred to me that the books title might have meaning beyond the merely biological. To grow up female is not just to develop in a womans body over time but also to emerge into a greater, less embarrassed, less hidden, and more present understanding of what being a woman means, as complicated and contradictory as that meaning might be.

Self-Help Demo, 1972.

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Abigail Heymans Groundbreaking Images of Womens Lives - The New Yorker

There is less than a week before we once more excercise our privilege of casting our vote. Twice a year were called upon to let our government know what we think about how theyve been running the country and we do that through our votes.

In preparing for coverage of next Tuesdays General Election, we asked what most newspapers ask of the county election office How many registered voters are there? The answer to that is 29,825.

Does that number represent everyone of voting age?

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the population of Jefferson County at the 2010 census was 45,200. The estimated population as of July 1, 2018, is 43,641. That leaves a 13,000 plus difference between the population and the number of registered voters. That could mean that most of those eligible to vote are registered when you eliminate those who are too young and those in nursing homes who may not be able to vote.

But in the May Primary Election with almost 98 percent of the votes in to the election office there were less than 7,000 votes cast. Think about that. Less than 7,000 votes cast. Thats slightly more than a fourth of the people registered to vote.

What would our forefathers who fought against taxation without representation have thought of it? Would they hang their heads in sadness or disbelief that the blood and tears they shed to fight for the right to be respresented was so unimportant to so many citizens?

The fight for that right didnt end with the Declaration of Independence for everyone. Women would later organize and fight to gain that right for themselves with the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

What would those ladies of yesteryear think of us today? Would they wonder how we could throw away a right they considered so precious because it gave them a voice?

Have we become so oblivious to how lucky we are to be able to freely and openly go to the voting polls and cast our ballot? In many countries they are not so lucky. While some claim they are democratic in their system of voting, when looked at closely they fail the test.

Theres plenty of excuses as to why someone didnt vote work, too busy, no transportation, etc. Those are just excuses though. There is an ATA bus system that can help or how about calling a neighbor, family member or a friend who lives in the same voting district and going to vote together. Polls are open from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m. so surely a quick stop to vote cant interfere with a persons busy schedule too much. Or how about planning ahead and picking up an absentee ballot at the county election office several weeks prior to the voting day.

Jefferson County has seen an upswing in people asking for the absentee ballots this election and we think thats wonderful. Just because one is on vacation or away on a business trip doesnt mean they have to give up their right to vote.

Of course over the years because of televised media coverage of elections we sometimes think our vote doesnt count. How often have you heard, or thought, its just one vote? Each vote does count. Yes, one may see the media call the election for a state and the polls havent closed yet. That doesnt mean the vote isnt counted or doesnt mean anything. First, it means you exercised your right as a U.S. citizen to voice your choices in who and how you want your municipality, your county, your state and your country to govern. What they do effects us.

Those early calls for the election are just estimations or predictions. They are not always correct.

Even when we cover an election, we get the vote tally for that night but it is not the official vote tally. That will come once write in votes are tallied and ballots are checked to make certain every vote was accounted for. Today, the technology makes those early tallies fairly accurate but upsets can happen.

There is also the fact that you may not be the only one thinking my vote doesnt count and thinking of not voting. When a majority of voters feel that way or are apathetic to the election or the candidates, there is a definite impact. In May more than 22,000 people in Jefferson County decided not to vote. That likely made a definite impact on who is on the ballot in the upcoming General Election. So, yes, your vote does count.

Id encourage everyone to get out and vote. Lets not waste this hard won right we have and for which many around the world envy us. If we dont use it will we someday run the risk of losing it because others saw our inaction and figured it didnt really mean much to us?

So mark Tuesday, Nov. 5, on your calendar and stop at your voting poll and let your voice be heard.

The rest is here:

Let's not waste our right to vote on November 5 - The Courier-Express

Comparison is a very foolish attitude, said Indian mystic Chandra Mohan Jain, popularly known as Osho (1931-90), because each person is unique and incomparable. Once this understanding settles in you, jealousy disappears.

It may be true, but the fact seems to be that this understanding settles in very few of us, and jealousy, as a shaper of character and social relations, is here to stay, barring a mass movement toward mysticism nowhere on the horizon at present.

Everyone knows the biblical stories of the jealous God and the first murder by Cain, jealous of the favor God showed his brother, Abel. One of the biblical Ten Commandments forbids covetousness, which in Buddhism is one of the three evils, together with anger and delusion.

But can we help ourselves? The business magazine President this month surveys 1,000 respondents, men and women, aged from their 20s to their 60s, and computes an average jealousy ratio of 42 percent, pretty much constant across the age and gender spectrum. What exactly this ratio means is not clear that nearly half of us are jealous? That were all jealous nearly half the time? Or is it a measure of the intensity of our jealousy when its aroused? Interpretation is at the readers discretion. The point is, its out there. Is it in you? You know best.

Its in the animals. Its in birds, President hears from psychological counselor Shinrai Oshima. Young birds fling helpless infant siblings out of the nest to their death. They will not share parental attention; they will have it all and no moral delicacy hold them back, as it would most of us. Presumably the parents are forgiving. Evolution would have stamped the practice out otherwise.

Love filial, parental, erotic is a demanding passion. Blighting its finer qualities is its possessiveness. Were not as different from baby birds as we like to think. Love shared is love threatened. Its our instinctive fear of solitude, Oshima says, that makes us feel that way. Today the pursuit of success has largely replaced the pursuit of love, and jealousy has evolved accordingly. How can I be content with my success if you my friend, my colleague, my child, someone I read about in the newspaper are more successful than I am?

Success has many symbols: an expensive foreign car, a luxurious house, money in the bank, friends in high places, a crowded social calendar, good looks and so on. All, according to President, arouse jealousy varying degrees of it in various people, but the upshot is that all these things symbolize superiority, and we all want to be, or seem, superior, whatever lip service we pay to equality. Stanford University research confirms it and even quantifies it: Men on average feel 22 percent superior to the average person.

Maybe thats good for us. Oshima says jealousy flows from the hippocampus, a region of the brain associated with learning. It energizes us, goads us onward against lethargy and discouragement. Maybe the more jealous we are the more talented, or vice versa. Certainly talent attracts jealousy parental jealousy of bright children; bosses jealousy of subordinates who outshine them. Its not a rule, but almost anyones life will provide anecdotal evidence.

Jealousy is shared by men and women, old and young (children are outside Presidents purview) but there are differences. Male jealousy, testosterone-driven, tends to be aroused by income, productivity, luxury and other symbols of successful competition. Women focus more on relationships: Shes more popular than I am, gets invited to more parties, gets on better with the boss; why was she invited to that office drinking party (which I didnt want to go to anyway) and not me? Women no longer depend on men as they once did, but age-old impulses die hard, and this one, says Oshima, is rooted in the primordial female search for a mate.

Expensive foreign cars who cares about them? Older men, mostly. Their jealousy can still be aroused at the sight of this preeminent status symbol of their youth. Todays youth, less car-driven, have other concerns: likes on social media; clothes that are photogenic on social media. Not that older people are indifferent to clothes. Its the generation in between that is, relatively. Fashion is back, after a 20-year span in which it counted for little.

Theres jealousy and jealousy. President, without defining the term, deals with its most benign form envy. Shedding it would no doubt make us better people leading more wholesome lives. Still, Presidents jealousy is a long way from Shakespeares green-eyed monster which doth mock the meat it feeds on. Shakespeares Othello was a man in love; Presidents survey respondents are comparatively unimpassioned men and women making their way in the workaday world, forever wanting a little more than they have as who, Osho notwithstanding, does not, in an economy stressing upward mobility?

We can only rise so high. Theres always someone richer, more powerful, better connected, better loved. Each person is unique and incomparable, said Osho; poverty, therefore, is as much an asset as wealth, once the understanding settles. Brutus magazine this month offers a suggestion conducive to that understanding: tea ceremony. Its an ancient Japanese pastime, excruciatingly formal to despisers of formality, soothingly ritualistic to the more favorably inclined. It can settle the understanding, says tea master Yuriko Ishida. Concentrating your consciousness on tea, you leave worldly thoughts behind; a moment encompasses eternity. I like that feeling, she adds, disarmingly.

Jealousy is the worldliest of thoughts feelings, rather. It has no place in the tea room. A century ago, writer and art critic Kakuzo Okakura (1863-1913), in The Book of Tea, invited the samurai to leave his sword on the rack beneath the eaves, the tea room being preeminently the house of peace. Then he will bend low and creep into the room through a small door not more than 3 feet in height. This proceeding was incumbent on all guests, high and low alike, and was intended to inculcate humility in whose light jealousy withers, if it ever does.

Big in Japan is a weekly column that focuses on issues being discussed by domestic media organizations. Michael Hoffmans latest book is an essay collection titled Fuji, Sinai, Olympos.

Go here to read the rest:
Examining a jealousy that's a long way from the green-eyed monster - The Japan Times

The 21-year-old played for the Tractor Boys Under-23s side last night against Coventry City, as per a report by TWTD.

Osho is out-of-contract at the Madejski Stadium next summer so may be weighing up his options for his next move.

He joined the Royals as a youngster and rose up through their youth ranks. The centre-back signed his first professional contract in July 2016.

Osho made his senior debut in a Championship fixture against Middlesbrough in September 2018, a game in which he was awarded the Man of the Match award. He has since made three more appearances for Reading.

He was loaned out to non-league side Maidenhead United for a brief spell in the 2017/18 before joining National League outfit Aldershot Town the season after, where he played 11 times in all competitions.

Osho then spent the second-half of last term on loan in League One at Bristol Rovers.

His long-term future at Reading depends on whether he part of their new manager Mark Bowens plans. He hasnt played for them so far this season, hence why he has been allowed to join Ipswich on a temporary basis.

Osho has gained some senior experience from his loan spells away from Reading and could be a useful signing for Ipswich if they choose to snap him up. He would add more options and depth to Paul Lamberts promotion chasing side.

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Ipswich Town taking a look at Reading defender - The 72 - We Love the Football League

This is BETTER Business, a new personal finance segment hosted by Stephanie Ruhle. Each week, Stephanie breaks down the financial headlines and how they'll affect your wallet and shares compelling conversations with industry leaders, entrepreneurs and people who've cracked their own personal money codes.

Are you saving enough for retirement? If youre already in your 50s or 60s, you may be all set. But for millennials and Generation X this information is crucial, so listen up.

Standard advice is to save 15 percent of your paycheck, but new research from MIT suggests the figure is much much higher, as reported by CNBC Make It.

According to the research, if you want to retire by 65 and plan to live off just half of your salary when you stop working you'll need to save 40 percent of your income over the next 30 years.

Why so much? Well, investment returns aren't forecasted be as high as they have been historically.

Your parents may have been lucky to see an average of 10 percent returns for their 401k investments, but realistically you should expect to see 3 percent over the next ten years.

Get the better newsletter.

So lets say saving half of your paycheck isnt possible it really isnt an option for a lot of people. What can you do? Adjust your future plans. Here are some things to consider:

Staying in your job longer means you can put off dipping into your retirement savings. Even working part-time after you retire will help cover monthly costs.

Benefits from social security are much greater if you wait until age 70 compared to the age of eligibility at 62. That difference could help you make ends meet.

Have you been prioritizing the gym or eating better? How about that yearly physical? Now's the time. One of the biggest costs in retirement is health care costs. Take care of yourself while youre young, fit and healthy, its an investment in a different sense.

If you're currently in an area with a high-cost of living, your savings will go a lot further if you can move somewhere cheaper. Whether that's downsizing your home or moving to a state with a lower cost of living, it's worthwhile to do the math and keep your options open.

Its important to start thinking about this stuff now so you can plan ahead and secure a better life in the future.

See the whole BETTER Business show for this week:

Want more tips like these? NBC News BETTER is obsessed with finding easier, healthier and smarter ways to live. Sign up for our newsletter and follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

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Worried about retirement funds? These three things can help close the gap - NBC News

How much money will you need to retire?

According to a recent analysis by GoBankingRates.com, it takes more than $1 million to have a comfortable retirement in any state in America. That figure grows to more than $2 million if youre planning to retire in Hawaii or the District of Columbia.

The average age most people retire varies from state to state as well. The GoBankingRates.com analysis showed the average retirement age in every single state is below 67, though the District of Columbia comes in higher. On average, people in the U.S. retire at age 64.

The average retirement age in Alabama is a few years younger - 62. Thats one of the lowest average ages in the country.

The lowest average retirement age was 61 in West Virginia and Alaska.

At 67, the highest average retirement age was in the District of Columbia, followed by Hawaii (66); Massachusetts (66); and South Dakota (66).

The study showed the annual cost of a comfortable retirement in Alabama was $55,425, one of the lower figures in the country (you can compare that to $100,879 per year in Washington, D.C.)

You can see how every state ranks here.

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This is the average retirement age in Alabama - AL.com