Monday, June 23, 2008

How Much Will You Need to Retire?

There are levels of preparedness when it comes to looking down the road at your retirement and how much you will need when you get there. The basic level of retirement planning is to sign up for your 401k at work, support legislation to keep Social Security intact, buy some life insurance and let it go at that. This system will work so there is reason to call this bad retirement planning. After all, if you began preparing for retirement in your early adult life and stayed with it, you will have a resource to retire on and that’s a good thing.

But there is a way to take it to the next level and that is to actually start putting some flesh and bones on your vision of your retirement and get a feel not only for the fact that you will retire but how you expect to live in retirement. Very often, we have idealistic visions of retirement life based on media images or the fantasy life of living in luxury and having little to do but golf in the morning and drink campaign and eat caviar all afternoon. So if you can get a realistic view of what you have as your expectations for retirement, you can start making adjustments to your retirement planning package right now.

Start with how you see your retirement lifestyle working. If you want little more than a manageable retirement apartment, a cat and the chance to knit or watch ESPN without interruption, that is a fairly modest retirement lifestyle to prepare for. But other people have adventure and high living in their retirement dreams. So if world travel or living in a luxury setting is part of that dream, only one person is going to make that dream a reality and that is you.

An exercise that is fun and eye opening is to detail every aspect of your dream life in retirement. Start by picturing your living conditions. Include your diet needs and wants as well as any entertainment and recreational needs you expect to be a part of retirement. For example, if you know you will want to go on long fishing adventures several times a year, you will need a RV and the finances to support taking off for the most scenic spots within driving distance to kick back and enjoy the fishing. So include the physical and financial needs for that lifestyle in this “detail” step of retirement planning.

You can complete the exercise by getting to such a level of detail that you could go out and price the dream in today’s dollars. Then when you take your “dream retirement shopping list” out into the open markets and use retail locations, catalogs and internet sites to actually find out how much it would cost to have that retirement today, that will shed a lot of light on your retirement preparations that you are doing.

Now, the actual cost of those different components will be much higher when you actually get to the point of retirement. You could try to factor in inflation and make those kinds of adjustments but don’t play with the formula so much that you get the idea that it’s impossible and give up. However, another factor that offsets the inflation factor is that your retirement life will be less expensive then your current lifestyle. Your daily needs may not be as demanding. If you sell your house after paying off the mortgage, your monthly expenses will go way down and you will have a significant surge of retirement capital that will come from the sale of the house. And you are not raising kids, putting them through college or having to support the lifestyle and wardrobe of a working person. All of these things offset the inflation issue.

Thursday, June 19, 2008

Insurance for Your Retirement

If you are like me, it’s easy to get fed up with constantly paying insurance premiums. Writing a monthly check for car insurance alone will drive you crazy. Not to mention the direct withdrawals from your paycheck for health insurance and the hit to your mortgage for home owners insurance and you have a lot of money going out the window to pay for disasters that might not even happen.

But if those disasters do happen, you will be very glad you had insurance. But there is one big life event that is coming that you want to do all you can to prepare for financially and that is old age and retirement. While there is no “old age insurance”, you will find as you do your retirement planning that there are some very valuable insurance policies that are absolutely critical to a retirement life that is enjoyable, safe and prepared for.

We may or may not think of life insurance as part of retirement planning. After all, the benefits of life insurance, at least on the surface are for those who survive you after your death which doesn’t do you a lot of good when you are living and breathing. But you can invest in life insurance that also serves as a long term investment as well. These policies which are sometimes called “whole life” allow the funds you put in to be invested and to build a cash value that you can cash in on when you retire.

So you may want to carry $100,000 insurance when you are in the working world, paying a mortgage and trying to get the kids through college. But if you can then hit retirement, cash in on the investment value of that insurance and spend your golden years with just enough insurance to cover some protection for your spouse and funeral expenses, that is a better way to organize your insurance programs.

Another layer of insurance that a lot of people are taking advantage of is Medicare supplement insurance. Medicare is a great program that benefits a lot of people. But Medicare can only go so far. Those corny commercials for Medicare supplement insurance are goofy but they are on target that you need to have another safety net in the event you find yourself needing more extensive medical coverage than Medicare can provide. If you took the time to set up this kind of insurance early in your retirement planning, it will pay you big time when the need is there during your golden years.

A level of insurance that can be one of the biggest blessings if you become ill in your elderly years is in home health care insurance. Many times illnesses that you endure due to old age are not the kind of thing you would want to get through in an expensive hospital room. You will recover more quickly in your home but you still need someone to make sure you get your medications, take care of the little life details that you cannot tend to when you are poorly and be there if you take a turn for the worst.

This is where the care of an in home nursing service can be so valuable. This insurance can enable you to have care with you right in your home which will give you the care you need and take a lot of worry and work off of your family. And since all senior citizens need medical care at some point in their retirement life, in home health care insurance is a must.

By setting up these different specialized insurance policies early enough in your working life, you can get some value into them when the time comes for you to retire. Then you can you enter retirement with confidence knowing you have policies with reliable insurance providers to take care of the needs that you expect to come up during your golden years.

Friday, June 13, 2008

Make a Plan and Make it Work

Being ready for retirement is not something that just happens. Every single person you see in retirement today that is enjoying a leisurely life in their golden years are where they are because they planned for it. The first question that may come to mind is when the right time to start planning for your retirement might be. The answer is that if you are asking the question, it’s the right time. You really cannot start planning too soon. If you could start putting money back for retirement as early as right out of high school, that would be just that much more time you have to build up a really comfortable retirement nest egg that will serve you well when you need it in your golden years.

But most of us start thinking about retirement in our adult years and usually in association with some big life event such as getting married or having a baby. So we have one word of advice if you have been thinking about beginning a retirement plan. That advice is stop thinking about it and take action. If you make the subject a focus for you and your spouse to look at, you both will be glad you got off the dime and got moving on a plan.

Often the trouble with making a retirement plan is you don’t know where to start. Too many people just wait for their employers to introduce a 401K plan and they just dump some money in there and count on Social Security to be there in a few decades. Then they call it a day and call that a retirement plan.

You and I both know that your security in your golden years is too important to not take more seriously than that. So set aside some time each week for both of you to sit down and start thinking about how to create a retirement fund and how to plan to build a retirement plan that you can grow into. The first step always begins with you.

If you don’t know where to start, then admit that and set about to do some reading to get ideas. You are doing that right now by reading this article. But get out there on the internet and find some of the great books out there on retirement planning and take some time and read them. You will start out ignorant and end up an expert in retirement planning.

Keep plenty of notes during the discussion and learning phases so you have a road map of ideas to build into a plan for building a retirement fund. Once you have a simple plan, its time to talk to a financial advisor. If you trust your bank, go talk to them and see what they can do for you. Or you can seek out a friend or someone in your community who you know will be able to steer you toward how to build a retirement fund that is structured properly to protect your retirement money from taxes and be there for you when you need it when you are old and grey.

Now it is time to kick it up to the next level. Once you have a plan and perhaps are seeing it start to take off, start learning about investments. There are lots of places you can see your retirement funds go that will give you a nice yield that can make that fund grow more quickly do to shrewd investing. You can divert money to real estate, the stock market, mutual funds or other well know investments. Diversify where you put your money so no one financial reversal can whip out your retirement funding.

Above all stay on top of your retirement fund and your retirement plan. Review it together frequently to see if your retirement goals are still the same and your investments and pans for building our retirement fund line up with that plan. By making retirement planning as big a part of your thinking as planning your family or your career, you will give it serious attention over the years. And the result will be a strong financial plan that will give you good resources to enjoy a happy and worry free retirement life.

Monday, June 9, 2008

Make your Retirement Money Walk With You

Planning for retirement is a project that you do for virtually your entire adult life. The earlier you start putting money back for retirement, the better your golden years will be. And if you have been faithful in participating in your employers 401K plan, you can start to some serious money begin to build up as you realize the vesting of the employer matching funds and you continue to make your contributions month after month. It can get pretty exciting when you get those statements and you see your retirement fund really start to take shape.

But your career in business can take a lot of twists and turns along the way. And sometimes you change jobs for a lot of reasons. But the question comes up then, “What happens to my 401K money if I leave before retirement?” The good news is that you don’t lose it. The 401K program is federally monitored and once those funds go in there, they are yours if you are vested in them.

But if you move jobs several times during your career which is very common in the modern business marketplace, if you don’t take some action, you can end up with retirement money scattered over all of your last jobs which is messy and makes for a nightmare to keep track of. It would be better if you can make your retirement money walk with you so you know where it is and you can keep all of your retirement planning funds in one place so you can take advantage of them all at once when you are ready to retire.

When you first leave your employer to go to another company you are given a couple choices of what to do with your retirement funds. One option is to leave them behind to catch up with them decades later when you are ready to retire. In addition to wanting to keep this important asset with you as you travel from job to job, you have no idea if that employer will even be in business when you are ready to retire. You don’t need that kind of uncertainty when it comes to your retirement money.

Another option that is offered to you is to cash out your 401k and withdraw the results. While this may be attractive if you are between jobs, it’s really a bad idea. For one thing, the laws governing the 401k call for you to pay a large penalty if you withdraw them before retirement age. Not only that, once you take that money out of your retirement funds, it’s gone and your retirement planning will suffer a serious set back.

A very good option that is available to you is to roll your current 401K over to your new employer. Now if you left the last job without a new employer either through termination or leaving to start your own business, that may not be an option. If you are looking for a new job and think you will have one in the next year or so, you can leave your 401k money where it is and transfer it later though. In that way, your 401k continues to accumulate as one fund, not many.

But a third option is to roll the 401k money into a tax sheltered privately owned retirement fund. You own this account and you usually have an investment management company helping you with the investment and protection of that money until it is time for you to retire. This is an outstanding option because that investment company works for you so you call the shots about your retirement money. And if you use this option, you can still start with a new 401k fund at your next employer knowing you have a place to put the funds in the event of another change of jobs. And that puts you in the driver’s seat which is a very good feeling when it comes to retirement planning.

Saturday, June 7, 2008

On How to NOT Screw Up Your Retirement Planning

Planning for retirement is something grown ups do. So as soon as you can when you settle into your adult life, if you can get your retirement planning moving, you will benefit from the wisdom of moving on this early in life when its time for you to retire. Too often young people live in a fantasy world that they will never grow old. But short of the worst case scenario of an early demise, everyone is going to get old and its far better to do so with a plan then to “let it sneak up on you.”

This is something you don’t want to screw up. Is it possible to screw up retirement planning? Of course it is. If you speak to senior citizens who did not start planning in advance and got to their senior years with nothing to fall back on and no funds to use so they can step out of the working world and enjoy a more leisurely retirement lifestyle, that is an example of people who screwed up their retirement planning. So it’s good to know the common mistakes people make so you can avoid them.

Probably the biggest mistake that you can make in your retirement planning is to wait to start it until you are pretty close to retirement. If you want to retire at 60 and you don’t start getting ready until you are 55, you will not have nearly as well prepared a retirement package as if you had started when you was 25 or 35. By starting early, you can set back a small amount each month and put it into an IRA, your employer’s 401k or some other retirement vehicle. Then just let that money continue to accumulate and grow and before you know it you are sitting on top of a pretty substantial nest egg.

Speaking of sitting on top of a nest egg, the second big mistake people make is not leaving that nest egg alone. When that retirement investment fund starts to get big, it is really easy to look at it as a way to get you out of credit card debt trouble or to borrow against for some new plan or possession you want. Above all, resist this temptation. If you lose that retirement fund due to foolish use of the funds in your middle age years, you are back to square one with nothing to show for your years of hard work developing that retirement nest egg.

The plan of setting up withholding from your checkbook or a direct deposit to your retirement account of retirement savings allows you to go about your busy life knowing that your retirement planning is underway. This is step one but its not a good idea to never go back and review your retirement plan and see if how you are going about getting ready for retirement well in advance. Make it a regular ritual to sit down and review what is going on with your investment funds. Look at the way your investments have been performing and if you are not getting a good return on those money, make some changes. Remember, just because your retirement funds are being managed by the company you work for doesn’t mean the money belongs to them. It’s yours so be responsible and manage it.

Starting early and staying proactive about your retirement is your best approach to retirement planning and one that will result in a much bigger retirement fund for you to start your golden years with. And by taking good care of your retirement before you need it, you are guaranteeing that it will take good care of you when its time to depend on that fund for a happy and prosperous retirement lifestyle.

Tuesday, June 3, 2008

Planning for That Final Moment

There is a phrase people use when referring to estate planning and all the things you do as a responsible adult so when you get into retirement years, you don’t have to worry about those things. That is because one of the big objectives of retirement planning is to put all of your “affairs in order” as they say so if something came up, your kids would not have to deal with it. So you go through the checklist and make arrangements for your will and your DNR or “do not resuscitate” so the medical people will know what to do in the event you cannot be brought to consciousness.

But one level of preparation for your final years of a very full life that you may not have decided about is funeral preparations. Many funeral homes sell packages where you can pay for your casket and much of the funeral expenses well in advance. This is very appealing because you can think ahead about how you would like the funeral to go and select the casket and make arrangements so there is less guesswork for your family and loved ones if the moment comes up too quickly.

That is the real appeal of preplanning all aspects of what might happen when your final moments come. You don’t want to leave your children to have to try to figure out your life insurance, your estate issues, your will and your funeral if your demise comes along suddenly. Most of these preparations are pretty cut and dried and you want all the paperwork in order, legal and the person assigned to resolve your estate informed and legal so there is no time lost on getting things the way they should be if the moment were to come.

The big step of pre-buying your funeral plot, casket and paying for the funeral in advance is something to give some serious thought to. For one thing, you must be absolutely sure you are in the town where you will want to be buried. Many times later in life, a retired person wants to pack up and move to where the kids are living. That is one of the good things about begin retired and relatively unencumbered by a lot of possessions. If you are living in an assisted living center, the move is just not that difficult. So you don’t want to own property, even if it’s just a burial plot and have to deal with transferring all of that paperwork to another town if you do move with your kids.

But the compelling reason not to put money into a funeral arrangement package is that funeral homes are not great at managing those funds. There have been plenty of stories come out of late of mismanagement of funds buy funeral homes. Or if the company owning the funeral home is bought, many times the new company will not honor your contract with the previous owners and your relatives find this all out just when they least need to hear about problems.

A much better option is to take the same money you would have put into funeral arrangements and put it into a trust set aside just for this purpose. You can name who you want to have access to the trust and even write out in specific detail what you want the money used for and how you want the funeral to go. That form of living will or ethical will gives your relatives the resources they need to conduct your affairs and the directions you want them to have. But they have the flexibility to pick the funeral home and buy the plot that seems right at the time. The money can accrue interest and it is secure because it is still owned by the family right up until it is needed.

The desire you have to get your final arrangements arranged is a good one. But thinking through some of the problems that can come up if you do too much prearranging gives you the wisdom to make the right choices so you can enter your retirement years knowing that everything is arranged when and if, God forbid, the moment of your departure comes along.