Five Big Retirement Blunders

I want to give you a few minutes here and talk about five retirement blunders that I’m hoping you can avoid. The first one is not having a retirement plan for income. Where that income is coming from, how that income is invested and what is the long-term nature of that sustainable income that you have? How is that income going to be taxed? So again, I just kind of rattled off a few there just for income. But again, not having a plan for your retirement income can be a massive blunder and sense your income is really your lifestyle in retirement, that might be the single most important thing that you can plan for. You wouldn’t go into every single week of your life while you’re working not having a plan where your paycheck might be coming from or some form of income to provide for your family, right? Don’t do the same thing in retirement. Even if you’ve got a pot of money, you’ve got Social Security and maybe a Pension, you still got to have a long-term plan for that. The second blunder I see more relevant now lately is not having a plan that factors in inflation. You know you might be retired for 20, 30 or more years out there and likely that cost of goods is going to go up over time. How does that factor in to what your income is going to be and also what is the ability to produce that rising income as maybe that inflation goes up over the years. The third blunder is failing to save enough for your retirement. Again, this could be a couple, two-fold. One, maybe you weren’t prudent and didn’t start early enough or two, maybe retirement is a little more expensive than you thought it might be. So again, start prior to retirement. Start looking at what that retirement budget may be. The things that you want to do, those goals that you have in retirement so you have that end number, that end goal in mind so you can back in to what you need. So not having enough can be a massive blunder because hey, you know you don’t want your money to run out before you do. And not having a tax plan is the fouth one I want to talk about here. Again, taxes play a role in our lives from day pretty much, right? There’s different forms of that. And we’re talking about income tax here. While you’re working, you see it usually deducted right out of your payroll and paychecks. In retirement, depending upon that income stream that you’re using may or may not be taxable. You know Social Security, depends on some other stuff how much that’s going to be taxable. Pension, there’s different way depending on where you live and they type of Pension will determine that. You know IRAs, 401Ks, hey they’re likely going to be taxables. Roth IRAs, does that make sense for you and such like that? Again, having a tax plan through your whole retirement and all the things that you can modify with that are vitally important. And the final one I want to leave with you is this is mainly for those folks that are married out there currently, not have a surviving spouse tax plan. You know what happens if one of you was to pass away? What changes to the income? What changes to the expenses do you have and how is that surviving spouse going to adapt? If you’d like to try and avoid these blunders or work through these so you don’t see these in your retirement, give us a call at the number on the screen. We’d love to help you out and here at Centennial Wealth Advisory where we can help for you to plan to retire well.