A variety of events can adversely impact your retirement, from unexpected expenses, such as high medical or caregiving costs, to a stock market downturn. So can the fear of spending in retirement. If you don’t use your retirement savings, you can almost guarantee living a lower lifestyle than you could otherwise. That’s why a safe withdrawal rate isn’t 0%.
We all want to achieve a comfortable retirement: to have full control over our time to do what we want whenever we want for however long we want. Or, do you?
A layoff or buyout offer – voluntary or involuntary – is a difficult experience.
On the list of top retirement planning goals, long-term care funding for many people is probably near the bottom. Who wants to think about spending time in a nursing home instead of time in a vacation home? But as the life expectancy of older adults rises, almost everyone should consider having some kind of plan in place.
Losing a loved one is a difficult experience in many ways. It hurts emotionally, it hurts physically and, unfortunately, it often hurts financially.
Generally, one of the biggest retirement mistakes you can make is to leave an old 401(k) behind at a previous employer. Yet, people often make this mistake when switching jobs or retiring.
When saving for retirement, one of the first steps is determining where to put your money. Look up retirement plans and you’ll find a peculiar medley of letters and numbers, such as 401(k), IRA and Roth IRA, 457, SEP IRA and 403(b). What may sound like a list of secret societies or highway interstates is essentially government code for retirement accounts and plans available to American workers and savers.
Do you have a will or an estate plan? Around half of you reading this said “no.” And of those of you who said “yes,” most haven’t updated their will or plan in some time. If there’s a common unaddressed problem in the financial plans of many adults of all income levels, it’s what to do about their assets when they’re gone.
At the most basic level, college commencement speeches are intended to inspire and motivate graduates about to enter the “real world.” But these speeches often convey timeless pieces of wisdom that are relevant to anyone – including those 10, 20, 30 or even 40 years out of college.
Rest easy, dog food is off the menu. By that we mean you can ignore the extreme hyperbole surrounding fears about running out of money in retirement, such as the notion of having to eat Fido’s canned dinner.
