Think about how many years of your adult life you spend accumulating enough money in order to have financial security and the lifestyle you desire when you stop working for money. You do your best, save as much as possible, live within or below your means, fund your retirement accounts, maintain a low cost, well diversified investment portfolio, and then the big day arrives, and you say adios to your job, career or business.
Suddenly, all those years of saving and accumulating come to a screeching halt and instead of being in the accumulation phase, you now move into the distribution phase with your money. On paper, theoretically, this all makes sense, right? Your nest egg now needs to last your entire lifetime. No worries, right?
In the hyper consumer society we live in today, buy now, pay later has become the norm. Saving enough money for a secure retirement all too often takes a back seat to the immediate gratification of purchasing the shiny object in the window. Practicing the concept of delayed gratification - fuhgeddaboudit.
If you’re like most people near or currently in retirement, you’ve spent most of your adult life managing your personal finances to the best of your ability. You’ve witnessed your share of stock market crashes, often referred to euphemistically as “market corrections”, you’ve saved and hopefully invested well, and you’ve done what’s needed to have a nest egg large enough to never have to worry about running out of money during retirement.
If you’re among the millions of boomers beginning to plan for retirement, you’re most likely feeling a range of emotions that may range from euphoria to downright fear. Nonetheless, as you begin to prepare for this next phase of your life, step one is assessing where you stand financially right at this moment.
Yet on the road to assessing your financial readiness for retirement, unexpected events could occur that rock your world and change your life in ways probably unimaginable to most people. The story below actually happened. Names have been changed but events that occurred are unfortunately real.
This description is taken from Wikipedia:
"Permission to be a beginner again is the greatest gift you can give yourself."
The following is an excerpt from a recent article, titled, For Retirees, a Million Dollar Illusion, that appeared in the New York Times, Your Money section. Anytime there’s an article that discusses your ‘number’ needed for a safe and secure retirement, I’m hooked.
The article drew so much attention and received so many follow-up comments that the author actually wrote a follow-up to his original article. I encourage you to read the original article in full as well as the follow-up and see for yourself if $1 million is enough to safely retire.
“A person saving for retirement who chooses low-cost investments instead of higher-cost ones could have a standard of living throughout retirement that's more than 20 percent higher”, says Noble Prize winner William Sharpe.
In a recent interview published on the Stanford Graduate School of Business website, Sharpe, a professor emeritus at the school, clearly illustrates how much more money retirees would have if they saved for retirement using lower-cost index funds rather than higher-cost actively managed funds.
A couple of weeks back, I received a call from a client couple, (who I’ll call ‘Z’) who have been happily retired for a few years. During our conversation, they let me know they needed to take out some extra money for a one-time expense that their regular retirement income won’t quite cover. However, this isn’t the first time; in fact, it seems for client couple Z there’s a different one-time request more years than not.