By the time she hit her late 40s, Toni Eugenia wasn’t sure she would ever be able to retire.

Eugenia, 56, a pharmacy technician who lived in Houston, was nearly $200,000 in debt and earned a little over $50,000 a year. She had barely contributed to her 401(k) in more than 15 years of working full time.

“I didn’t even know there was a word called budget,” she says. “I was living paycheck to paycheck. Whatever I wanted, I put it on a credit card.”

A few months shy of her 50th birthday, she decided to make a change. She enrolled in a 12-step personal finance course taught by Dave Ramsey, who preaches the value of a debt-free lifestyle.

“I took that course and my whole life changed,” she says. Within three years, she and her fiance managed to pay down all of her debt — including a $150,000 mortgage, a $19,000 timeshare and more than $30,000 worth of credit card debt. In 2013, they decided to move to Seattle, where they married. Eugenia’s wife, 11 years her junior, continued working, but Eugenia, they decided, could finally afford to retire — a decade sooner than most working Americans today.

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Eugenia is among more than 500 retirees who shared the keys to their success in a new eBook "The Retiree Next Door" to be released on Thursday by MoneyTips.com. The personal finance education site asked retirees who considered themselves to be living comfortably to discuss everything from their net worth and income to their shopping habits and savings strategies.

“About six months ago we did a survey and found that one-third of baby boomers had no retirement plan,” says Marc Diana, CEO of MoneyTips.com. “We wanted to go to the other end of the spectrum and [talk to] retirees who were successfully retired to see if they could help connect the dots.”

You don’t need millions to retire happy

The idea that you need millions saved up to retire comfortably doesn’t exactly ring true, at least in this survey. More than 70% of retirees surveyed say their net worth is less than $1 million. Two-thirds live on less than $100,000 in annual income, and 80% cite Social Security benefits as their main source of income.

This could be comforting news to many workers who are feeling behind on their retirement savings. A recent report by the Employee Benefit Retirement Institute found that only 11% of workers have managed to save more than $250,000 for retirement outside of their defined contribution plan.

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