Your Guide to Retirement Planning

Our guide to your retirement plan. Let’s talk about a few quick hitters here that anybody can do to start setting up a successful plan for their retirement. First, set goals for your retirement. Now we’re assuming you haven’t retired yet at this point. What are the three things that I want you to have in the goal? One, what does retirement look like? This is maybe the most important thing. Retirement is different to every single person I’ve ever talked to. Their goals and aspirations and dreams look so different. Map that out. What do you want to be doing? Is retirement travel? Is it spending time with grandkids? Is it pursuing that hobby you’ve always wanted or maybe it’s even working part-time in something you’ve always wanted to do. Again, wha does that look like? The second piece, when? When are you going to retirement? Is it in the next six months? Six years or 20 years? Make sure you kind of have a target there and if you’re getting close, pick a day, right? We need to have that certainty in place. And the once you know what it looks like and when, what do you think you’re going to spend? What is that budget? Now some people in retirement spend far less than when they’re working. Others find that they spend more in retirement because now they have more time on their hands, right? So again, what does that look like, okay? So that’s the goal part. Then what advantages? Let’s start taking advantages of retirement planning tips and tricks a little bit here, if you will. Okay one, what tax bracket are you in right now? Do you know? Hey, If you don’t, this is something you want to find out. Because this is going to dictate what retiring accounts you may want to use. You want to carefully examine where our taxes are now and what they look like in the future. How are we going to save the biggest amount that’s going to benefit your retirement? Again, it might not be today. So often people want to defer, defer, defer and then all of a sudden when we get into retirement we’re like whoa. Why did I defer all these years? Now I have to pay all of these taxes. So again, part of this retirement plan is figuring out when to pay taxes on that, okay? Next, carefully consider your investment allocations. So again, going back, how far are you away from retirement right now? That’s going to play a role in what investments we pick. Also, carefully examine what your personal risk tolerance is. Stop being told what your risk should be. Stop listening to your neighbors that say you should be invested in this. What is your risk comfort level? You’re willing to lose “x%.” We have some people that walk in and they say Art, if I lose a penny, I’m coming in here with a baseball bat. They don’t say that, but I get that idea right, where they don’t want to lose anything more. There’s investments out there that we can tailor for you for that. There are other folks that are okay with full risk exposure. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that it’s comfortable for you. Next, make savings automatic. If you haven’t already done so, make sure you’re taking advantage of your workplace retirement plans, 401Ks 403Bs, 457s, whatever it may be. Take advantage of that. Circling back to what I said earlier, taxes. Maybe you have a Roth component of that. Consider that option if it’s appropriate from your tax standpoint. But make it automatic. Make it so that it’s coming out no matter what, that you don’t have to decide oh, should I write a check this month to fund my retirement? Oftentimes, unfortunately that’s what people’s last thing that they’re doing because it may be so far down the road. If you don’t have access to a workplace plan or even if you do, consider adding your own personal IRA, personal Roth account if your income levels match that and you can kind of double up and make that automatic or direct deposits are happening you know every month or something along those lines. Now, use retirement planning to help you make financial decisions. So when you’re making financial decisions today, make sure those are fitting into your retirement plan. How you’re spending your money today, how is it impacting you? A bigger purchase today can kind of have a domino affect on your retirement over time. So making sure those are fitting in there. So Social Security, when, how and what does that look like? So start to think about this. Understand how Social Security credits work and how you’re getting credits and benefits for those that are accumulating over the years. Double checking your statements every year to make sure those are the appropriate methods and such like that. So I hope you found those valuable, just some little tips and tricks with your retirement planning guide. So you can plan to retire well.