Some retirees succeed at realizing the life they want; others don’t. Fate aside, it isn’t merely a matter of stock market performance or investment selection that makes the difference. There are certain dos and don’ts – some less apparent than others – that tend to encourage retirement happiness and comfort.
Financially speaking, retirement might differ from your expectations. Just as few weathercasters can accurately predict a month’s worth of temperatures and storms, few retirees find their financial futures playing out as precisely as they assumed. Because of this, some common financial assumptions (and anxieties) about retirement are worth examining.
Topics: Retirement, RetirementRSS
For many people, retirement income may come from a variety of sources. Here’s a quick review of the six main sources:
If you ever have the inkling to manage your investments on your own, that inkling is worth reconsidering. Do-it-yourself investment management is generally a bad idea for the retail investor for myriad reasons.
The journey to and through retirement occurs gradually, like successive chapters in a book. Each chapter has its own things to consider.
Are you in a hurry to retire? Not everyone is rushing to that particular finish line. According to the 2018 retirement survey from the Transamerica Center for Retirement Studies, which gauges the outlook of American workers, 56% of those who describe themselves as “fully retired” did so before age 65, while another 14% said goodbye to the daily grind in the year they turned 65. But that still leaves a significant number – 30% of respondents – working beyond age 65, with some even indicating that they never “expect to stop working.”1
You learn lessons as you invest in pursuit of long-run goals. Some of these lessons are conveyed and reinforced when you begin saving for retirement, and others, you glean along the way.
1 – Assuming retirement will last 10-15 years.
When Social Security was created in the 1930s, the average American could anticipate living to age 58 as a man or 62 as a woman. By 2017, life expectancy for the average American had increased to 78.6. That said, this average may bely the fact that many retirees could live well into their nineties or beyond.1,2
Assuming you will only need 10- or 15-years’ worth of retirement money could be a big mistake.
Put yourself steps ahead of your peers. If you have a young, growing family, no doubt your to-do list is pretty long on any given day. Beyond today, you are probably working on another kind of to-do list for the long term. Where does “saving and investing” rank on that list?
You can prepare for your retirement transition years before it occurs. In doing so, you can do your best to avoid the kind of financial surprises that tend to upset an unsuspecting new retiree.
