Challenge: Record your "One Minute Retirement Soundbite"

Hey guys and gals, I have a challenge for ya! We are all used to writing so much on our blogs that I thought it might be fun to get out of our comfort zones a bit and instead record a one minute soundbite about our retirement plans. Basically, your story in one minute.

Here, I'll start. Listen to my recording below:

My One Minute Retirement Soundbite

Remember, this is just for fun!

Don't sweat background noise or making it "professional". Just record your voice as you give us the one minute scoop about your plans for financial independence and early retirement. Plenty of cell phones are capable of recording voice, and nearly every laptop is as well. Are YOU up for it?

When you're done, either make a blog post with your soundbite or send the file to me and I'd be happy to offer up your One Minute Retirement Soundbite here for others to listen to. Or do both!

A few notes about how I recorded my soundbite:

I used Audacity to record my voice, which is a free and feature-rich audio recording software package available for Windows, Mac and Linux. Learning curve is fairly low if you have a basic understanding of audio. Even if you don't, an hour or two working with the software is generally all that's necessary before feeling comfortable with the interface and its capabilities.

Although I have a very nice Snowball Microphone (Amazon), I just used the high quality built-in microphone on my MacBook for this audio. It does a nice job of cutting white noise without any post-recording editing.

I chose to include an audio soundtrack from BenSound.com - Buddy. I did this by adding the sound file into a new stereo audio track within Audacity and faded the track in at the beginning and out at the end with just a few simple clicks within the Audacity interface.

Note: Although Audacity includes a wide variety of audio editing capabilities (like white noise removal, equalization, normalization, amplification, etc), I used NONE of these features for this audio track. The only modification performed was a reduction of the volume of the soundtrack so my voice was the prominent feature.

Though you're welcome to get as fancy as you like, there is no reason to worry over this stuff. The point is to record your one minute retirement story for the rest of us to listen to, if you're up for it.

Who's in? Will you accept the challenge?