Retirement Planning
Retirement planning has changed so much over the years. It used to be that the average employer provided, and fully funded a pension plan for their employees, and that was only a supplement to social security that covered the lion’s share of your retirement income needs.
Today you must be employed by public sector organizations, educational institutions, or the remaining rare companies that still provide a pension.
The 1970s represented the birth of the 401(k) and this was the true instrument of shifting responsibility to employees to fund and take charge of their own retirement planning.
You need to take advantage of the available financial instruments, strategies, and expertise to achieve the ideal retirement. The advantage is that there are considerable tools available to accomplish your retirement planning goals. With time and expert advice, you will discover that planning for retirement can be considerably less stressful than you might expect.
Your whole working career is a balance of incremental financial decisions that are for the present and for the future. Naturally, you have dealt with the unexpected along the way as well as numerous decisions that prove to serve you well for the moment that later requires re-examination.
Everyone’s goals mimic much of the same priorities around lifestyle choices, family, and sacrifices of the present for the benefit of the future.
Where parallels cease to exist are in the path and journey getting there. The measure of risk to begin a business or relocate to follow a dream can potentially reap great rewards, or become life lessons. With so many variables in life, the decisions of a financial nature can at least be mitigated with the right plan in place.
We take all that represents value to you and develop a comprehensive retirement plan to approach your investment options for your time frame, address risk tolerance, apply tax efficiencies, and consider future estate and legacy considerations.
Administering this process through expertise, research, and insights, along with coordinating tax and legal professional advice allows for the creation of your retirement planning blueprint.
Retirement Planning Goals
When working on retirement planning, it is usually about your income, expenses, and savings habits of today to fund tomorrow’s dream retirement. What is often less discussed, but truly more important is to think about what your retirement will look like.
Once you have executed the initial plans you had the moment you retired then what? Will you be content to keep it simple and focus on leisure time and spending quality time with family and friends? Or does your ideal retirement involve lofty foreign travel and dining out at fancy restaurants?
When beginning to imagine your financial needs in retirement, it must correspond to how your retirement planning should be designed. Focusing on the goals you would like to accomplish in your golden years will give you a roadmap that everything else will follow, so you can build a plan for your retirement around those goals.
Retirement Income Needs
The first 10 years of retirement is the fragile decade that you need to address with caution to stage the rest of retirement well. Covering essential expenses should be the primary allocation, all else is secondary, travel, leisure, etc. Then you should establish what represents your safe money and money at risk. Some choose to leave market risk behind and plan with safer investments, while others may choose to continue to stay in the market but reduce their risk. Both can serve you well with the right plan in place.
A retirement budget is a far more comprehensive way to examine your money needs. Predicting your lifestyle in the future can be difficult the further you are away from retirement, but using your current budget is a good starting point. Some expenses will be reduced because of your lifestyle, while others will increase due to inflation. Financial calculators at Bankrate can help you see where you are.
Knowing you have enough to live comfortably is great, but how do you know if it will last? Life spans are increasing, but so is the cost of healthcare. Stretching your savings over the full length of your retirement is the goal, one that we can show you how to navigate with precision.
The earlier, the better
Time is the biggest advantage you have in saving for retirement. Time allows you to take less risk, time gives you the opportunity to take advantage of compound interest, and most importantly, time can cost you less money.
Planning early, a relatively small amount of money set aside each month can add up to a significant sum by the time you choose to retire. The longer you wait, the less time you have, which means more money and potentially more risk to achieve the same outcome.
Maximize your contributions and match
There are few opportunities in life to get free money. Most employers offer just that in the form of matching contributions to your retirement savings.
Funds are given dollar-for-dollar to a certain amount or provided as a percentage of your contribution each month. Make sure to contribute to get as much of this free money as possible. If not initially, increase your contribution over time to get to the maximum match available.
Master your tax allocations
Employer retirement plans allow for tax-deferral, and some even allow for ROTH or tax-free future benefits. Investments for the most part are taxable accounts, with some that vary.
There is a balance you should consider between paying some taxes today as compared to every penny being taxable in your future when living on retirement income. We can show you how that balance can work for you today and tomorrow.
Diversify and modify over time
Diversification is the process of spreading your investments among different types of products: stocks, bonds, mutual funds, annuities, and cash equivalents. By doing so, you give yourself protection against major losses of one type of asset class while also providing yourself exposure to potential gains in a different area.
You should also consider what stage of life you are in and when your allocations should shift to suit less risk.
Risk and reward
In deciding what types of investments your retirement savings represent, it’s important to think about both risk and reward.
When you are still in the accumulation phase, you are focusing on growth to design your future retirement. As you transition to the distribution phase, the focus becomes sustainable lifetime income. Just as your priorities can change, so must your investment style throughout the phases of your life.
Take emotions out of your investments
Emotions play havoc on your financial decisions. Working with a wealth advisor can bring considerable expertise and knowledge, but can also simply represent a great perspective to your unique situation.
Just as practice makes perfect, with retirement, you only have one try to get it right…, unless you model your scenarios, weigh different strategies, apply financial planning principles, and you do it day-in and day-out. That is the value of a wealth advisor.
Retirement planning is unique to everyone
When you envision the ideal retirement, your mental picture will be vastly different than others. In some cases, that picture may even be different than your significant other’s picture of perfection.
No matter the size of your dream, you can work towards the best possible version of it with small steps along the way. Retirement planning allows us to guide you in the steps to navigate the journey to achieving whatever version of your ideal retirement.
Successful retirement planning in Orange County begins with a conversation, schedule yours today:
When you envision the ideal retirement, your mental picture will be vastly different than others. In some cases, that picture may even be different than your significant other’s picture of perfection.
No matter the size of your dream, you can work towards the best possible version of it with small steps along the way. Retirement planning allows us to guide you in the steps to navigate the journey to achieving whatever version of your ideal retirement.