Tag: early retirement

6 Retirement Essentials (Most people only prepared 2 or 3)
Jason 0 Comments Retire Wealthy Retirement Planning Tips for Retiree's
I'm planning for retirement most people focus
mostly on marshaling together enough money you know Financial Resources so that they can last
the distance and then maybe at the back of their heads they have some vague plan right perhaps
two or three things to fill the time with a lot of the times this is stuff like travel family
well unfortunately I'm gonna say that's not quite nearly enough for Preparation we ourselves
have been retired for two years and going looking back on the past two years I kind of see like
six essential things that if you prep for it beforehand before your retirement starts I think
this can really make such a positive difference to your retirement so that's what I wanted
to bring up and discuss with you guys today number one first and foremost of course we have
to talk about money most people's concern is the amount of money that they have in retirement
whether it will last them till the end come comfortably and allow them to afford the Hobbies
like travel good food Etc but I actually think after going through the last two years building up
our financial Acumen is just as important if not more so what do I mean by Financial Acumen I mean
stuff like budgeting tracking projecting investing I mean if you think about it the money in your
bank account can always be squandered we all know that story I think more importantly what's
going to make your retirement more fireproof is having an ability to generate more money where
it came from in the first place so the second essential thing that you can prepare for so that
you have a wonderful retirement it's definitely the ability to be self-directing and disciplined
self-direction definitely helps so much with spending your retirement days meaningfully right
after all there are no more like work schedules or like demands from colleagues or bosses to help
shape your days anymore you have to be the person to take charge in retirement there's a study out
there actually that shows that for happily retired folks most of them actually have about 3.6 core
Pursuits that's what they say and the unheably retired folks tend to have less than 3.6 corporate
suits coming in at about 1.9 call Pursuits that's what the study reflected I guess it kind of just
shows in retirement you really need to fill your life to the brim and keep busy with activities
you love and that is a really great formula for happiness and self-direction will help you
to achieve that state as well as discipline because if you think about it like discipline
directly affects the state of your finances right it affects whether you stick with your retirement
planning whether you keep fit and active and you get to maintain your health in retirement even
whilst you're left up to your own devices even to find your cover suits if you don't have any
when you're starting or in your retirement so discipline and self-direction will be like
the building blocks for enjoying your life in retirement the third essential thing you might
want to work on and cultivate or happy retirement is people skills right so studies and research
have reflected very consistently that the main determining factor for happiness and Longevity
for most of us is actually relationships Human Relationships friendships relationship with
your spouse and with your family I guess if you look at most of us you know we all have
a little need of work on some social skills in some aspect I mean some of us are a bit shy
paper hats or graph or maybe socially anxious working on our people skills really will help us
to get along and live happily with our spouse and family members and also importantly to make
new friendships at whatever age we all know that making new friends gets a lot more difficult
as we get older I mean I haven't heard anyone say otherwise for me personally making new friends
as I get older is the biggest challenge there's this huge feeling that nothing can replace
friendships with people who have known you all your life but it is also a challenge as I
have chosen to exercise through Arbitrage in our retirement and we've moved away from home
so those friends aren't with us in our present I find that it takes a lot of intention I have
to consciously push myself to broaden my Social Circles and make the effort to get to know people
on a more intimate basis I am also very happy to be able to say that it has paid off in that for
the last two years in Bali I have actually made two or three new friends that I'm happy to say are
kindred spirits and not just social acquaintances so that's very nice and it's a huge Comfort to our
daily life here in a foreign land away from home now before we move on a big thank you to
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MooMoo ad using my link in the description below now back to the video the fourth essential
thing that you can definitely work on and that will benefit your retirement tremendously it's
actually courage you're definitely gonna need lots of courage in retirement and I guess this isn't
a skill exactly it's kind of more of a quality but in retirement you need a lot of courage
to even plunge into retirement you need the courage to you know take that leap of faith to
stop putting it off due to fear of the unknown feel or financial insecurities so then it's all
about courage at that stage not let fear and insecurity rule your life and your decisions it
is also the courage to recognize that in life at the start at the end in the middle the Domino's
you need are never all nicely lined up you know at some point you just got to jump into it and
then learn to cross the obstacles as they come so for retirement long term I guess the
biggest issue most commonly is always money but my perspective on this is that hey budgets
can always be reduced money can always be earned or recouped or whatever happens so I still
think that you know it is actually beneficial to Advocate an approach whereby you get to
a point where you feel that you have most of your Ducks lined up you've planned well you've
prepped for it grab hold of your courage with both hands and then take the plunge people tend
to think of retirement as the end but it's not it's the start of a new phase where you should be
trying so many new things new Pursuits new ways to live and for each of these new adventures
you're gonna need courage to take action and once you have taken the plunge you'll find the
next fifth thing very very useful and that would be a mentality of resilience especially in early
retirement there are a lot more decades ahead of you you know and therefore a lot more chances that
they things can go wrong whether it be down to bad financial planning or perhaps an unexpected Health
catastrophe or even sometimes natural disasters whatever comes I guess you will always need that
strength of Will and the resilience so that you can roll with the punches and then get back up
you want to know that you have the mental strength that even if things go pear-shaped you won't just
give up and lose hope and certain Corner you've got to Marshall what you've got inside you go out
there find Solutions perhaps if necessary you've got to go back to work but know that later on
you can return to retirement and try again so the sex essential thing that I believe will benefit
everyone in retirement is to cultivate an attitude of gratitude we all know life is a very long
journey hopefully at least and so much of what we Chase using most of our years actually doesn't
really matter in the big picture once you have taken a step back and then at that point is when
you start realizing the earlier you cultivate and attitude of gratitude and that appreciation for
the simple little things that are probably around you everywhere every day the happier you probably
will be and it sounds silly but it's not really automatic I mean we all live and grow up and
work and go to school in a society that kind of innovates us with messages that we need to reach
for more have more ambition gives us you know that High definitions of success in life that we
have to try to jump to reach and nobody sings the Praises of the pleasures of a simple cup of
tea you know the importance of family time with your loved ones or or just the pleasure of being
able to take an evening walk on the beach with your dog so I think that it's very important that
somebody reminds you that you know you can not overload what you already have what you're already
surrounded by growing that muscle of appreciation so that in each and every moment you are present
in your own life you see all the little Joys that you're surrounded with every day and if you
live life like that I think that will help you achieve contentment with just the small stuff
around you and that's what majority of your life in retirement may be about is just a small stuff
every day but in my own retirement here in Bali it is what makes me so grateful and so happy every
day that I am surrounded by my loving husband and very interesting and independent little dog
that's very very cute you know that we have very comfortable a bit simple house we have the ability
to enjoy good food even if it's simple stuff from the war rooms locally we have a garden and
beautiful things are growing around us every day the weather is great you know stuff is good yeah
I think this is one of the most essential simple things that's often overlooked simply because it's
a matter of mentality but I believe this essential quality or characteristic could make all the
difference for you so these are the six essential things that I believe are very very important for
you to cultivate and prepare for in the leader to actually taking the plunge into a return then I
think that if you have these six strong skills and qualities going for you you will be in a position
much more well placed to make the best out of your retirement however long that period may be let me
know what you think of my suggestions whether you agree or if you think they suck let me know why
but in any event I really appreciate you tuning in and sharing my thoughts for this week and
wherever you are in the world I'm wishing you a happy Saturday evening and let's speak again
next week till then you take care and bye for now

When can I retire? | How much Retirement Corpus is enough?
Jason 0 Comments Retire Wealthy Retirement Planning Tips for Retiree's
Hello friends welcome to
yadnya investment academy. Today is friday. So today we will talk about
a financial planning topic. Today's topic is Related to retirement planning A very common question of you all that come Obviously this all knows. Retirement is a very important goal. If we talk about financial goals. Mostly it should be. Mostly when i do financial planning So many persons financial
planning i have done personally Then in that comes. Retirement is a very important goal. In which we need a lot of money Nowadays early retirement is occurring. FIRE environment talks are occurring. Financial free retire early In such things When retirement comes in goal One important thing comes How much money do I need? Tell me this much money is enough.
Then I can retire. That is a normal question. For this we have already
developed an interesting calculator but that was before pay wall. Now we have removed that from pay wall because it is very useful calculator. So a retirement calculator we have made. In that with so many
permutations combinations We can get an idea This much retire corps I need. If I reach here then I have done well. I am at least financially free. Now I have to retire. We have to work further or not. Then it is my decision. If above that. Now I am just sharing my screen.
Now you will see here You will go on investyadnya website There is a section named
tracker and calculator. In this there is a retirement calculator. Open this Now here we have to fill information. Suppose i am putting age of 30. You have to retire suppose on 60. Suppose we took an
example i have to retire on 60. Life expectancy we mostly suggest We should keep 90, 95, 100. With a conservative estimate If you keep 100 then it is very
good conservative estimate. If you want to take optimistic If you took practical then it should be 90. Suppose i am putting here 95. Fourth information is our Current annual expense When we do retirement calculation Obvious we took assumptions.
One assumption is this the
expense i am doing today Suppose when i retire Then also my expenses should be like this. Means my lifestyle of now remain maintained Neither i increase nor decrease. Suppose I am spending 50k per month today. The expenses that are occurring. After retirement I will do the same expenses. After retirement expenses can reduce. It can be your house if
you are living now on rent. It can be so much rental expense. That can reduce. Now your children's expenses are so much.
They will reduce at that time. Sometimes after retirement
expenses increase. Like vacation expenses mostly increases. Sometimes medical expenses increase. Some expenses have increased. Mostly as an advisor If we took a general advice then we say. Keep the same expenses as they are now. Don't do much changes in that. Some increases some decreases. For example if we want
to do a simple calculation Then considering to current expenses Suppose my expense is 50,000 The profile we are taking has
expenses of 50,000 per month.
Then it is 6 lakh rupees per year. You have to put today's expenses. You don't have to put off retirement age. That's all it will insert. Inflation number How much inflation number we have to take? 7% inflation is mostly suggested by India. If you want to be conservative
then you can take 8%. If you want to be aggressive
then you can take 5-6%. Inflation you should calculate by your own. Every year how my expenses are increasing? If you know little bit idea about that These things are increasing
according to my expenses. Edcuation expenses children's fees It increases almost 8-10% every year. Rentals mostly 10%. Landlords mostly increases rent by 10%. My personal inflation is 8, 9-10%. You take according to your. So for calculation here
I am taking 7% inflation. Then return on investment. On the basis of return on investment. How much is my return on investment? Before retirement and after retirement.
Now I am retiring at 60. At 30 I am starting investing. How much should I invest for that? How much retirement corpus I will get? The reason I am investing now. On that how much return should I expect? It depends where you are investing. If you feel I will invest
mostly in equity markets. Retirement oriented because it is very long horizon. I am of 30 years and retiring at 60 years. Horizon is of 30 years. All that I am investing I will invest mostly on equity. Then we can take 11-12%
return on investment All that we will invest now. Or we kept in equity we can take that. If you feel This house is my retirement corpus This will increase according to that. Then on real estate the return
on expectations that remains. Basically there is round inflation of 7-8%.
It depends on you if you have EPFO. That is a very big retirement corpus On EPF we get around 8%. According to that you have invested here. Overall that you are investing Or you are planning This is for retirement
and I am going to invest. What are expected returns on that? Till 60. Pre retirement is retirement on investment. Suppose it is 12%. Whole the money I will put in equity. Then you took 12% return. Then post retirement my corpse will become. How much will it grow? Suppose I retire and I get corpus of 5 crores.
Then 5 crore rupees Where will I invest? Again very difficult question If you are of 30 years then in 60 years. This is very difficult. This is a very big assumption. We have to think mostly at 60 our risk profile decreases. We will not take much equity allocation. Suppose now we have 60-70 equity allocation That time it becomes 20-30% or 40%. I go a little bit on conservative. I say to most of the people Take percentage equal to inflation I get return same as inflation. If I want to take.
Then 0.5-1% extra. We took here 8%. Means 8% of post retirement. My corpus will grow 8% after that. Inflation will remain 7%. This is planning according to that. We will discuss these points later. Therefore I am doing all these zero. We inserted these things. What we say? Our retirement age, life expectancy. Our annual expense, inflation. These all are our compulsory fields. If I consider this now. Sorry some value needs to be inserted. Randomly value we are inserting. So that it can work.
If I consider this now. Then I need retirement
corpus of 14.6 crores. If you are of 30 years and you have to do expense of 50k per month. At today's value Today's 50k offcourse will not remain same at the time of retirement. They will increase with inflation. If you have to maintain today lifestyle The 50k expenses you are doing today Same you want to do at 60. After 30 years. This is the value after 30 years. Don't be so afraid. Today 14.5 crore is very much. After 30 years the value of 14.5 That should be arounf 70-80 lakh or 1 crore I am doing guess work. It will not be more than that. Think if I have 1 crore rupees today then I will be able to do for next 35 years. 60-95 years means 35 years 35k per month That to inflation to adjust it. I will get it consistently till 95 in 95 it will become zero. If i invest lumpsum then i can invest 50 lakhs.
Considering I don't have anything. If I have 50 lakh rupees I will invest it. For 30 years they will grow by 12%. Expected pre-retirement. Then also my retirement money will be done. Monthly Sip that I have to do That is around 50,000 in this. 48,000 rupees sip i need in this. What is the meaning of step up? I will tell this in next. If you have plan in 30 years 60 years.
I have to do all these things. Then you have to do monthly sip of 48,000. To retire for next 30 years. Remember this is a monthly sip. It will not increase. Every year you have to do 48k consistently. Obviously our salary will increase in years Inflation increases salary increases. Now 48,000 will seem so big But after 3-5 years You will not feel big amount. That's what I am saying. In that our step up point comes. Now you will say I don't have 48,000 to invest. It is a very big amount. From where 48,000 will come. If we are spending 50,000 Then by saving 50,000 we
can invest in retirement corpus. That is not possible. Then in that our second comes step up sip What is the meaning of step up sip? What is annual increase in our income? Can we increase sip every year? I cannot invest 48,000 now but from next year i can increase.
If you think my annual increase in income. If inflation is of 7%. With 7% income should increase If we take seven With 7% it is increasing. We considered 7% inflation. Salary is also increasing by 7%. In worst case salary is not changing. With 7% there is increase in salary. Existing investment Do you have any investment now? That you think this is my retirement income From that also it will reduce. Suppose if you have EPFO corpus Suppose of 5 lakh rupees. 5 lakh rupees i inserted here. This is my EPFO of 5 lakh rupees. I will use it for retirement. On that how much return I will get on EPFO? Return are 8% Then we consider we will get 8%. It is tax free means you will get 8% Suppose i have 5 lakh rupees On that i will get 8% more. Now let's do calculation again. Now since EPFO arrived. From 48 it became 46. Retirement corpus remained same.
So now we have to do Sip of 46,000. We can do step up sip of 24,000. We invested 24,000 rupees this month. Every year we increase that by 7%. From annual increase in income we have to do this annual increase in sip. Today you started sip of 24,300. Next year increased 7% on that. Then again in next year increase 7% on that Compounding 7%. Increase 7% every year Till the age of 60. Then also your goal will be achieved. Then you will have 14.6 crores rupees. Considering these were our rates of returns So it is very very good. You can apply so much
permutations and combinations on this.
I have little more money than 24,000. I can do upto 35,000. Can I retire early? Then can I retire at 58? On 58 it will happen at 29,000. I have 35,000. Can I retire at 55? Now your interesting calculation will start No you need 37,000 For retirement at 55. Early retirement you can take at 37,000. If i do 37,000 per year. I invest in such investments
that give me 12% every year. 7% increase i put minimum. If you think 7% increase is less. Consider growth of salary minimum 8-10%. Why not? Consider 10%. Then in Rs 28,000 you can retire at 55. Retirement corpus also reduced. As early you retire that much less corpus you will want.
Value of money comes less. At that time its value will be more. At the age of 55 we need 11.6 crores. How much lump sum funding we need? How much monthly sip
and stepup sip we need? I considered 10% annual increase. Like this If you can do so many
permutations and combinations. You can plan yourself. When can I become financially free? I think this is very interesting calculator If you like as i am a conservative investor I am not taking 12% from whole equity. Suppose we take 9%. This we keep 10. The rate of return become 9% from 12%. Obviously both the sip's will increase. You can do calculation according to that. Which type of investor is I am? If you think here is also 9
then it will change again. These things you can do so many permutations and combinations
based on your profile. You will get so much support and understand If I invest this much money For this much time Then I can go towards a better retirement.
This is how you should work on these things. You can plan early retirement. You want to spend so much or not. 50,000 will not be sufficient. I want to increase my lifestyle. Now I am spending 50,000. But at that time I want to spend 75,000. Acc to that by using
permutation and combination What are my savings now? I can plan such investments or not. Then in those things you will get
so much help from these calculator..
Do check that on our website. If you have any comment If there are complications
then visit our website. Below is our email address and
whats app number is given. All things are written below. You can email us there
if you have any query. Below there is comment section also. Must write in comment section. Hit a like if you liked the video. If you think some knowledge is added Then hit a like Have a great time ahead friends Jai Hind.

Can I Retire at 55? Tips for Early Retirement
Jason 0 Comments Retire Wealthy Retirement Planning Tips for Retiree's
If you're thinking of retiring at 55, you want to be careful about where you get your advice and guidance, and that's because most retirement advice is geared toward those who retire quite a bit later, in fact… Most people retire at 62, but things will be different for you if you're going to retire at 55. So that's what we'll talk about for the next couple of minutes here, we'll go over where you can get the money from, and how that works with taxes as well as healthcare, then we'll look at some actual numbers and what it might look like for somebody who retires at age 55.
We might also want to get philosophical just briefly and ask the question, Why age 55? Yes, it's a nice round number. And there are some interesting tax strategies that are available around that age, but let's say you could retire a little bit earlier at 54, would you want to make that happen? Or if you worked a few more years… I know you'll think this is crazy, but if you worked a couple of more years and you could not impact your finances, but still take some of those dream vacations and spend time with loved ones, would that be worth it to maybe work until 59, for example? So we want to figure out exactly why you are pursuing a particular goal and then we can improve the chances of success for you, so let's start with health coverage, this is a tricky one because you're retiring quite a bit earlier than most people who might be near that Medicare age, so you have a number of different options to continue being covered, and it is a good idea to have real health insurance coverage just in case something happens.
So a couple of your choices include, number one, you can continue your current benefits from a job if you have them for up to 18 months in most cases, and that's under COBRA or your state's continuation program, that can get quite expensive because you're going to pay the full price, if you weren't already doing that, plus perhaps a teeny little bit extra for administration, but it is a way to continue with the program that you currently have, so that can be helpful if you are mid stream in certain treatments or if it's going to be hard to get certain benefits that you currently have on a different health care program, unfortunately, that's not usually a long term solution because we need to get you until age 65, which is when most people enroll in Medicare, and you should see your costs go down quite a bit at that point, maybe depending on what happens, so another solution that a lot of people look at is buying their own coverage, and that happens typically through a healthcare marketplace or an exchange, and that's where you just by coverage through an insurance company.
So you can go directly to the insurers, but it's often a good idea to go through… Start at healthcare.gov, and then go through the marketplace or the exchange, and that way you can shop some plans and potentially, depending on your income, you can potentially get some cost reductions that make it a lot more affordable, I'll talk more about that in a second, but another option is to switch to a spouse's plan, if you happen to be married and that person has coverage that's going to continue for whatever reason, that might also be a solution for you, when you leave your job, it could be a qualifying event that allows you to get on that person's program, but let's talk more about saving money on health care expenses before age 65, most people are going to buy a policy based on the factors that are most important to them, so that could be the premium or the out of pocket maximum, the deductible, the co pays, certain areas of coverage, all that kind of thing, you can select a plan that fits your needs.
Now, you might find that those tend to be quite expensive, and so if your income is below certain levels, you might be able to get effectively a reduction in the premium, it might be in the form of a tax credit or a subsidy, so here's just a preview of how things could look for you, let's say your income is, let's say 50,000 in retirement, and you need to look at exactly what income means, but there is no coverage available from a spouse, we've got one adult, and let's say you are… As our video suggest age 55 here, so you might get a benefit of roughly 422 a month, meaning you could spend that much less each month, and that's going to make it a lot easier to pay for coverage on these plans, if we switch your income down to 25,000 per year, the help is even bigger, so as you can see by varying or controlling your income, and this is something you might have some control over if you retire at 55, you can also control your healthcare costs, we'll talk about some conflicting goals here, where you might not want to absolutely minimize your income during these years, but this is important for you to know if you're going to be paying for your own coverage, and if you're experiencing sticker shock when you see the prices…
By the way, I'm going to have a link to this and a bunch of other resources in the description below, so you can play with this same calculator yourself. Now, once you're on Medicare, the cost should drop quite a bit, this is a calculator from Fidelity where we can say, let's say you are a female, and we're going to say you're eligible for Medicare at this point, so we'll bring you up to age 65. It is going to be quite a bit higher cost, if you look at it before age 65, and that's because you are paying for those private policies from insurance companies, let's say you're going to live until age 93, and so you might expect to spend roughly 5800 6000 bucks per year, depending on your health and your location and other factors, it could be more or less, but this is an estimate of what somebody might spend, a single woman each year in retirement, of course, that number is going to increase each year with inflation and deteriorating health issues.
But this is a ballpark estimate of what you might be spending in the future, now we get to the question of, do you have the financial resources to retire at 55? And that comes down to the income and the assets that you're going to draw from to provide the resources you need to buy the things you want and need, and one way to look at this is to say We want to avoid early withdrawal penalties because again, you are retiring at an age that's earlier than the typical retiree and most retirement accounts are designed for you to take withdrawals at 59.5 or later, to avoid those penalties, fortunately, you have a couple of options, so with individual and joint accounts, just taxable brokerage accounts, you can typically withdraw from those without any penalties, but you may have capital gains taxes when you sell something, those taxes may be at a lower rate than you would pay if you take big withdrawals from retirement accounts, but you just want to double and triple check that, but that can be a liquid source of funds. You. Can also typically withdraw from Roth accounts pretty easily.
So those regular contributions come out first, in other words, you can pull out your regular contributions at any time with no taxes and no penalties, what that means is that's the annual limit contributions you might have been making her by year, so the 7000 per year, for example. That money would be easily accessible, but if you have other money types like Roth conversions, for example, you're going to be very careful and check with your CPA and find out what all of that could look like. There. Are other ways to get at funds that are inside of pre tax retirement accounts, and it might actually make sense to draw on those to some extent, we'll talk more about that in a minute, but these are some of the tricks you can use to avoid an early withdrawal penalty yet still draw on those assets before age 59.5.
The first one is the so called rule of 55, so this applies if you work at a job with, let's say a 401K, and you stop working at that employer at age 55 or later, if you meet certain criteria, then you can withdraw those funds from the 401k so they go directly from the 401k to you. They don't go over to an IRA, you could withdraw those funds without an early withdrawal penalty.
A complication here is that not every employer allows you to do that, so 401k plans can set a bunch of their own rules, and one of them might be that they don't let you just call them up and take money whenever you want, they might make you… Withdraw the entire amount, so if that's the case, this isn't going to work, so be sure to triple check with your employer and the plan vendors and find out exactly how this would work logistically or if it will even work. Next, we have SEPP that stands for substantially equal periodic payments or rule 72. This is an opportunity to draw funds from, let's say your IRA or a certain IRA that you choose, but before age 59 and a half without getting early withdrawal penalties. Now, this is not my favorite choice. I don't necessarily recommend this very often at all, and the reason is because it's easy to slip up and end up paying tax penalties. The reason for that is in part that it's really rigid, so when you establish this, You calculate an amount that you have to take out every year, and it has to be the same amount every year, and you have to make sure you do that for the longer of when you turn age 59 1/2 or for five years.
And even that sounds kind of simple, but it's still easy to trip up, and you also have to avoid making any kind of changes to your accounts, so it's just really rigid and can be difficult to stick to you, so… Not my favorite choice, but it could be an option. Those of you who work for governmental bodies, maybe a city organization or something like that, you might have a 457b plan, and those plans do not have early withdrawal penalties before 59 and a half, so you could withdraw money from that and use some income, pre pay some taxes, and have some money to spend fairly easily, this by the way, is an argument for leaving money in your employer's 457 versus rolling it over to an IRA, because once it goes over to an IRA, you are subject to those 59 1/2 rules and a potential early withdrawal penalty.
So that could end up leaving you with 72 to work with, for example, which again is not ideal. So you might be asking, well shouldn't I just minimize taxes and hold off on paying taxes for as long as possible? And the answer is not necessarily. So it could make sense to go ahead and pre pay some taxes by getting strategic, the reason for that is that you will eventually have to pay taxes on your pre tax money and it might happen in a big lump, and that can bump you up into the highest tax brackets, so it could be better to smooth out the rate at which you draw from those accounts and hopefully keep yourself in lower tax bracket, at least relatively speaking.
So when your RMDs or your required minimum distributions kick in after age 72 under current law, that could possibly bump you up into the highest tax brackets, maybe you want to smooth things out and take some income early. So let's look at the question of, Do you have enough with some specific numbers, and before we glance at those numbers, just want to mention that I am Justin Pritchard. I help people plan for retirement and invest for the future. I've got some good resources, I think, in the description below, some of the things that we've been talking about here today, as well as some general retirement planning information. So if this is on your mind, I think a lot of that is going to be really helpful for you. Please take a look at that and let me know what you think of what you find. It's also a good time for a friendly reminder, This is just a short video, I can't possibly cover everything. So please triple and quadruple check with some professionals like a CPA or a financial advisor before you make any decisions, so let's get back into these questions, Do you have enough? As we always need to mention, it depends on where you are and how much you spend and how things work for you.
Are you lucky to retire into a good market, or are you unlucky and retiring into a bad market? All of these different aspects are going to affect your success, but let's jump over to my financial planning tool and take a look at an example. This is just a hypothetical example, it's the world's most over simplified example, so please keep that in mind, with a real person, we've got a lot more going on. The world is a complicated place and things get messier, but we're keeping it very simple here, just to talk about an example of how things might look, so this person has one million in pre tax assets and 350,000 in a brokerage account, and if we just quickly glance at their dashboard here, pretty high probability of success, so let's make it a little bit more interesting and say… Maybe that IRA has, let's say, 700,000 in it. What is that going to do? And by the way, this is still a lot more than a lot of people have, but again, if you're going to be retiring at 55, you typically have quite low expenses and/or a lot of assets.
So let's keep in mind here that retirees don't necessarily spend at a flat inflation adjusted level, and I'll get into the assumptions here in a second, but let's just look at if this person spends at inflation minus 1% using the retirement spending "smile," that dramatically improves their chances, and I've got videos on why you might consider that as a potential reality, so you can look into that later at your leisure, but as far as the assumptions, we assume they spend about 50,000 a year, retire at age 55.
The returns are 5.5% per year, and inflation is 3% per year. Wouldn't that be refreshing if we got 3%… So we glance at their income here age 55, nothing, and then Social Security kicks in at 70. They're doing a Social Security bridge strategy. I've got videos on that as well, or at least one video, the full year kicks in here later, and then their Social Security adjust for inflation, looking at their taxes, we have zero taxes in these earlier years because they are just not pulling from those pre tax accounts. Maybe not getting much, if anything, in terms of capital gains, maybe their deduction is wiping that out, so we may have an opportunity here to actually do something and again, pre pay some taxes and pull some taxable income forward.
In fact, if we glance at their federal income tax bracket, you can see that it's fairly low from 55 on, maybe they want to pull some of this income forward so that later in life, they are drawing everything out of the pre tax accounts all at once. It just depends on what's important to you and what you want to try to do, and that brings us to some tips for doing calculations, whether you are doing this with somebody, a financial planner or on your own, you want to look at that gap between when you stop working and when your income benefits begin from, let's say, Social Security, there's also that gap between when you stop working and when Medicare starts, and that's another important thing to look at, but what are your strategies available there? Should you take some income, and exactly how much? That's going to be an area where you might have some control, so it's worth doing some good planning.
We also want to look closely at the inflation and investment returns, and what are the assumptions in any software that you're using, for example? These are really important inputs and they can dramatically change what happens… You saw what happened when we switched from a flat inflation adjusted increase each year to the retirement spending smile, just a subtle little adjustment has a big difference on how things unfold, and in that scenario, by the way, we would typically have healthcare increasing at a faster rate. But like I said, we use an over simplified example and didn't necessarily include that in this case, but you do want to click through or ask questions on what exactly are the assumptions and are you on board with those assumptions? You may also need to make some adjustments, and this is just the reality of retiring at an early age when you may have 30 plus years of retirement left, a lot can happen, and there really is a lot of benefit to making slight adjustments, especially during market crashes, for example, so.
If things are not necessarily going great, some little tweaks could potentially improve the chances of success substantially, that might mean something as simple as skipping an inflation adjustment for a year or two, or maybe dialing back some vacation spending. These are things you don't want to do, that's for sure, but with those little adjustments, you can potentially keep things on track, and that way you don't have to go back to work or make bigger sacrifices. And so I hope you found that helpful. If you did, please leave a quick thumbs up, thank you and take care..
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Early Retirement Success Story – How He Saved 12 Crores in His 30s | Fix Your Finance Ep 36
Jason 0 Comments Retire Wealthy Retirement Planning Tips for Retiree's
If you want to retire early, then this video
is for you. Today we'll meet a man who has a corpus of
more than 10 crores and has managed to retire completely before
the age of 40. We will learn how to start planning, how to
do the calculations for early retirement and what all things to keep in mind before
leaving your job. So watch this video till the end and to support
our channel, like the video right now. FIX YOUR FINANCE Hello and welcome to a new episode of Fix
Your Finance. Today I have Ravi Handa with me. Welcome to the show Ravi. Glad to be here. How's early retirement treating you? It has its good parts obviously. What are the good parts? You can spend time on things which you were
not able to do earlier. And what are some of the bad parts of retiring
early? You lose a lot of value and a lot of validation
that you used to get from a job.
You have described your retired life in 2023. Let's take it back to like 15-16 years back. So, what did you study? I have done engineering in computer science. And what was your first job? Where did you start working? I started working in the education sector
itself. I joined IMS Calcutta which is a CAT coaching
company. Okay. And what was your first paycheck? 25,000 odd rupees. When you retired in 2022, what were you doing
back then? Actually, before that, I used to run a business
from 2012 to 2021. Which was in the education sector. My company was acquired by Unacademy. So, the last 1-1.5 years of my working career, I was with Unacademy as director content sales. So, how many years did you work? I worked from 2006 to 2010. Then I took a year break. 2011 is when I got married. 2011 is when I joined this IT company called
Mindtical. What was the trigger to start your own thing? When I was working for IMS, at that point of time itself, I started making educational videos on YouTube
around 2008.
Gradually, they became popular. Not very popular. And this was CAT coaching for MBA? CAT coaching. First, I started with math. Then I went to GK through math. Then to LRDI, then to English. I kept on expanding. And how was the business? How did it work? Business was profitable from day one. Because there was no expense. Yes. In today's date, the cost of videos or ads
in EdTech has gone astronomically.
In 2012, it was extremely simple. Because I don't think anyone was doing it. Or even if anyone was doing it, they were not such a big player that you cannot
really compete. On an average, what was the kind of profits
or salary that you guys were drawing? We had good years when we did revenues of
3 crores as well. We had bad years when we did revenues of 25
lakhs as well. There was massive fluctuation. In 2021, your company got acquired. Correct. It got acquired and then there was that vesting
period wherein you had to work. Correct. And after that, you got an exit. Correct. So, were you actively looking for an exit? Yes. Again, I am telling you the same. So, during the COVID period of 2020, my wife was pregnant at that point of time, So, my wife and I used to sit and chat about
what to do with life. And this is what emerged that we have to sell the business at whatever valuation possible, whatever sort
of deal you get. Because getting out of business is the priority. After selling the company, there will be a
vesting period wherein you were working with Unacademy.
Correct. What was your compensation then? Exact numbers I can't reveal because of the
NDA. But my salary was a little above 1 cr. And the ESOPs of the vesting, that was another additional 50 lakhs or a
little more than that. Wow! So, you have a lot of money in Edtech, I am
guessing. Yes. But I didn't get this for my skill or my talent. Okay. This I got primarily because they were acquiring
my company and this is a way for them to pay out the
money slowly rather than on day one. What is your background? Which college did you study in? IIT Kharagpur. Did that also help in your, you know, starting your entrepreneurial journey? Absolutely. I am telling you, there are a few things which have helped me a lot in life. To take risks, to experiment. One, my parents were always independent. I have never had to give a single rupee to
my parents. The second thing which has really helped me
is my wife was very well educated and in a very good
job which allowed me to take a lot of risks.
The third is that I went to a good college and through that college, you build a network. I have friends in senior positions in multiple
places. This is it. You are the sum of your privilege, your background and the people that you have interacted with over your life. Okay, so now we will talk about your expenses. Do you live in a rented apartment or is it
an owned? It's an owned flat. I shifted to Jaipur in 2015 to be closer to
my parents and at that point of time, I purchased the
flat that I still live in today.
Did you take it on loan or did you pay in
cash? No, it was entirely in cash because at that
point of time, I had been doing business for 2-3 years. The second thing is your travel. So, do you have a car or do you travel in
cabs? I have a car but I don't really like to drive
that much. So, how much fuel do you spend on a monthly
basis? I have no idea. So, you don't track expenses in general? That way, no. So, The way I track expenses is at the beginning
of the financial year, I check how much money was in the bank account. Throughout the year, I just find out how much
money went out of your bank account. So, that's how I determine how much I spent
this year. So, on an annual basis, how much did you spend
in the last 3 years? Around 2 lakh rupees goes into maintenance. Society, maintenance plus the other property
that I own.
5-7 lakh rupees is the vacation. Another 2-3 lakhs would be eating out, drinking,
parties. Parties, not the pub parties. Parents' 50th anniversary, the first birthday
of the child. So, all these parties add up. 3 lakhs or a little more than that would go
towards the house help staff. These are the big hits. Now, it is time for the main thing, which is talking about your financial independence
and retirement plans. The first and main thing is figuring out your
FIRE number. How much money would I need to not work and can retire comfortably. So, in which year did you seriously start
thinking about FIRE? Which year? Covid, 2020. 2020 is when I actually sat down and did the
numbers.
Where I have this much money, I will put this
money here and there. So, it took me around 3 months, maybe 6 months to figure out how much money I exactly need,
how do I need to invest it. And then it took me a couple of years, 3 years
to execute that. So, if your annual expense is 25 lakhs, if you take a multiple of 30, it is 7.5 cr. Right? So, what are some of the milestones that you
took into account? There are two major chunks that I have kept.
One of them is nearly everyone likes and accepts
that you have to save money for your child's higher
education. So, I have earmarked 50 lakh rupees for that. Wow! I will give it to him at 18 or whatever appropriate
age. 7.5 Cr plus 50L. For this? Yes. 8 cr. Another 50L is what I wanted to keep as a
sort of play money for experiments that I would want to do. Angel investing is one of them. Crypto investments is one of them. I am doing a podcast right now, so it has
its own expenses. Yeah. You should check out his YouTube channel,
okay? Every month, two videos come up specifically
talking about how to achieve FIRE. Okay? There is a link in the description.
Definitely subscribe. That is 50 lakhs, your play money. How is that going by the way? Angel investments and other investments? I have lost a lot of money in angel investments. I have lost a little bit of money in crypto
as well. But the biggest problem in angel investments
is that it is extremely illiquid. There is no honesty. So, I had put 3 lakh rupees in a company in
2019. In 2021, it became 45 lakh rupees. Ravi Handa is happy that it is done. Did you get an exit? Exit? The company closed in 2023. It became zero. Oh shit. So, that is the problem with angel investment. That's why you have allocated an amount which you yourself have called play money. Correct. Any other milestones that you have covered? No, these two. 8.5 cr was your FIRE number. You said that you started investing a huge
amount since 2015. You started investing or saving more.
From 2006 to 2015, did you manage to save any portion of your
salary? Yes, we were always saving more than 50-60%. We used to save this much. So, it was business, revenue was high, that's
why you didn't save. It was something which was there. Your expenses were always lower than what
you were earning. So, have you accumulated the 8.5 cr ? A little bit more than that. Very nice. How much percentage of that, if you are comfortable
sharing, how much percentage has come from selling
your company and how much percentage of the proportion
has come from your savings? I would say that selling the company probably
gave me 20-25%. Which basically means that this was not a
result of a certain event. No, no. So, this was because my business was successful. The second factor was that my expenses were
very low. The third factor was that I always had substantial
investment in equity. The fourth factor is where I would say the
selling of the company comes in. The main money that was made was made by business. And let's say if you were doing your software
job, you would have been in the top positions, In that case, do you think this much wealth
accumulation would have been possible? If I was in India, then no.
If I had gone abroad, then I would have been
way ahead of this. Is that one of those things that you would,
you know, you look back and want to change? I regret it every week. If I had been a good student, if I had studied
in college, then I wouldn't have been in the coaching
line. I would have moved to the US or Canada or
Europe or somewhere after college. I can't believe that you are saying that you are not content with what you have achieved
financially. I am absolutely content with what I have achieved.
Because I have bounced back from the mistakes
of not studying in college. Yeah. The 8.5 cr that you have accumulated, that too, what are the percentages where you
have invested? My current net worth would be somewhere between
12-13 cr. Out of this, 1-1.5 crore rupees, which is
my 4-5 years of expenses, I keep it in absolutely liquid low risk investments. So, this is my cash bucket. In the medium term bucket, I have taken a
balance advantage fund. I have long term bonds, gilt funds, which is another 4-5 years of expenses. So, a mix of equity and debt. Third bucket, which is my long term bucket, another, I believe, 6-7 crores would be in
that and then there is a piece of land that I own
which is around 2 cr. Tell me one thing, how to go about it? Primarily if you are young you need to save,
develop as a habit sort of a thing but your focus should be on making money.
Where will you earn money from? Either you will grow in a job or you will
join risky jobs like startups to get ESOPs or you leave the country, you go abroad you
earn a lot more there, you save a lot more there and you come
back and you know you can be in a very good situation or what you do is you get a higher
degree. Suppose you have done engineering, MBA, Masters
in Engineering, there are plenty of avenues. Your main focus should be on making more and
more and more money. Because after one point your expenses can't
get less. So if you want to increase the alpha, the
difference in income and expenses that will only happen if you are constantly focusing on increasing
the top line. Let's say I have decided that I want to retire
early. What was the framework? What were some of the thought processes? One according to me even hoping for planning
for early retirement is sort of accepting a failure that you couldn't make your career
in your life better that's why you are going towards retirement.
Yes financial independence is important, early
retirement is not. If you are in a job that you like, that you
enjoy or I will say if you are in a job or in a career that you don't hate, do not think
about early retirement. Early retirement became important for me because
I wasn't liking what I was doing. So this is our quick finance round. You have to answer the questions as soon as
possible. If you had an unlimited budget, what would
you gift your wife? Vacation, luxury vacation. If money was out of consideration which in
your case holds true, what would you do for a living? I don't know I will keep experimenting with
it which is what I am doing right now.
And the last question is for people who want
to achieve financial independence and you know are seeking early retirement, what are
2-3 nuggets of advice that you would share with them? For financial independence, increasing your
income as much as possible that should be your priority. The second priority should be that bulk of
your savings should go into equity. If you are chasing early retirement, I think
that is a bad chase to have. That should be, that is like surgery, that
should be the last option. Try changing your job, try changing the city
you work in, try changing the country you work in, try changing your careers. If there is no avenue, that is when you think
about early retirement. Alright, that brings us to the end of the
episode. Thank you so much for sharing your journey. I am sure that a lot of people have learnt
a lot from today's episode and video.
Make sure to check out his YouTube channel. Every month at least 2-3 videos are made on
this topic. Subscribe to his channel and if you liked
anything in this video, subscribe to my channel as well. Goodbye..

Can I Retire at 55? Tips for Early Retirement
Jason 0 Comments Retire Wealthy Retirement Planning Tips for Retiree's
If you're thinking of retiring at 55, you want to be careful about where you get your advice and guidance, and that's because most retirement advice is geared toward those who retire quite a bit later, in fact… Most people retire at 62, but things will be different for you if you're going to retire at 55. So that's what we'll talk about for the next couple of minutes here, we'll go over where you can get the money from, and how that works with taxes as well as healthcare, then we'll look at some actual numbers and what it might look like for somebody who retires at age 55.
We might also want to get philosophical just briefly and ask the question, Why age 55? Yes, it's a nice round number. And there are some interesting tax strategies that are available around that age, but let's say you could retire a little bit earlier at 54, would you want to make that happen? Or if you worked a few more years… I know you'll think this is crazy, but if you worked a couple of more years and you could not impact your finances, but still take some of those dream vacations and spend time with loved ones, would that be worth it to maybe work until 59, for example? So we want to figure out exactly why you are pursuing a particular goal and then we can improve the chances of success for you, so let's start with health coverage, this is a tricky one because you're retiring quite a bit earlier than most people who might be near that Medicare age, so you have a number of different options to continue being covered, and it is a good idea to have real health insurance coverage just in case something happens.
So a couple of your choices include, number one, you can continue your current benefits from a job if you have them for up to 18 months in most cases, and that's under COBRA or your state's continuation program, that can get quite expensive because you're going to pay the full price, if you weren't already doing that, plus perhaps a teeny little bit extra for administration, but it is a way to continue with the program that you currently have, so that can be helpful if you are mid stream in certain treatments or if it's going to be hard to get certain benefits that you currently have on a different health care program, unfortunately, that's not usually a long term solution because we need to get you until age 65, which is when most people enroll in Medicare, and you should see your costs go down quite a bit at that point, maybe depending on what happens, so another solution that a lot of people look at is buying their own coverage, and that happens typically through a healthcare marketplace or an exchange, and that's where you just by coverage through an insurance company.
So you can go directly to the insurers, but it's often a good idea to go through… Start at healthcare.gov, and then go through the marketplace or the exchange, and that way you can shop some plans and potentially, depending on your income, you can potentially get some cost reductions that make it a lot more affordable, I'll talk more about that in a second, but another option is to switch to a spouse's plan, if you happen to be married and that person has coverage that's going to continue for whatever reason, that might also be a solution for you, when you leave your job, it could be a qualifying event that allows you to get on that person's program, but let's talk more about saving money on health care expenses before age 65, most people are going to buy a policy based on the factors that are most important to them, so that could be the premium or the out of pocket maximum, the deductible, the co pays, certain areas of coverage, all that kind of thing, you can select a plan that fits your needs.
Now, you might find that those tend to be quite expensive, and so if your income is below certain levels, you might be able to get effectively a reduction in the premium, it might be in the form of a tax credit or a subsidy, so here's just a preview of how things could look for you, let's say your income is, let's say 50,000 in retirement, and you need to look at exactly what income means, but there is no coverage available from a spouse, we've got one adult, and let's say you are… As our video suggest age 55 here, so you might get a benefit of roughly 422 a month, meaning you could spend that much less each month, and that's going to make it a lot easier to pay for coverage on these plans, if we switch your income down to 25,000 per year, the help is even bigger, so as you can see by varying or controlling your income, and this is something you might have some control over if you retire at 55, you can also control your healthcare costs, we'll talk about some conflicting goals here, where you might not want to absolutely minimize your income during these years, but this is important for you to know if you're going to be paying for your own coverage, and if you're experiencing sticker shock when you see the prices…
By the way, I'm going to have a link to this and a bunch of other resources in the description below, so you can play with this same calculator yourself. Now, once you're on Medicare, the cost should drop quite a bit, this is a calculator from Fidelity where we can say, let's say you are a female, and we're going to say you're eligible for Medicare at this point, so we'll bring you up to age 65.
It is going to be quite a bit higher cost, if you look at it before age 65, and that's because you are paying for those private policies from insurance companies, let's say you're going to live until age 93, and so you might expect to spend roughly 5800 6000 bucks per year, depending on your health and your location and other factors, it could be more or less, but this is an estimate of what somebody might spend, a single woman each year in retirement, of course, that number is going to increase each year with inflation and deteriorating health issues.
But this is a ballpark estimate of what you might be spending in the future, now we get to the question of, do you have the financial resources to retire at 55? And that comes down to the income and the assets that you're going to draw from to provide the resources you need to buy the things you want and need, and one way to look at this is to say We want to avoid early withdrawal penalties because again, you are retiring at an age that's earlier than the typical retiree and most retirement accounts are designed for you to take withdrawals at 59.5 or later, to avoid those penalties, fortunately, you have a couple of options, so with individual and joint accounts, just taxable brokerage accounts, you can typically withdraw from those without any penalties, but you may have capital gains taxes when you sell something, those taxes may be at a lower rate than you would pay if you take big withdrawals from retirement accounts, but you just want to double and triple check that, but that can be a liquid source of funds.
You. Can also typically withdraw from Roth accounts pretty easily. So those regular contributions come out first, in other words, you can pull out your regular contributions at any time with no taxes and no penalties, what that means is that's the annual limit contributions you might have been making her by year, so the 7000 per year, for example. That money would be easily accessible, but if you have other money types like Roth conversions, for example, you're going to be very careful and check with your CPA and find out what all of that could look like. There. Are other ways to get at funds that are inside of pre tax retirement accounts, and it might actually make sense to draw on those to some extent, we'll talk more about that in a minute, but these are some of the tricks you can use to avoid an early withdrawal penalty yet still draw on those assets before age 59.5.
The first one is the so called rule of 55, so this applies if you work at a job with, let's say a 401K, and you stop working at that employer at age 55 or later, if you meet certain criteria, then you can withdraw those funds from the 401k so they go directly from the 401k to you. They don't go over to an IRA, you could withdraw those funds without an early withdrawal penalty. A complication here is that not every employer allows you to do that, so 401k plans can set a bunch of their own rules, and one of them might be that they don't let you just call them up and take money whenever you want, they might make you…
Withdraw the entire amount, so if that's the case, this isn't going to work, so be sure to triple check with your employer and the plan vendors and find out exactly how this would work logistically or if it will even work. Next, we have SEPP that stands for substantially equal periodic payments or rule 72. This is an opportunity to draw funds from, let's say your IRA or a certain IRA that you choose, but before age 59 and a half without getting early withdrawal penalties. Now, this is not my favorite choice. I don't necessarily recommend this very often at all, and the reason is because it's easy to slip up and end up paying tax penalties. The reason for that is in part that it's really rigid, so when you establish this, You calculate an amount that you have to take out every year, and it has to be the same amount every year, and you have to make sure you do that for the longer of when you turn age 59 1/2 or for five years.
And even that sounds kind of simple, but it's still easy to trip up, and you also have to avoid making any kind of changes to your accounts, so it's just really rigid and can be difficult to stick to you, so… Not my favorite choice, but it could be an option. Those of you who work for governmental bodies, maybe a city organization or something like that, you might have a 457b plan, and those plans do not have early withdrawal penalties before 59 and a half, so you could withdraw money from that and use some income, pre pay some taxes, and have some money to spend fairly easily, this by the way, is an argument for leaving money in your employer's 457 versus rolling it over to an IRA, because once it goes over to an IRA, you are subject to those 59 1/2 rules and a potential early withdrawal penalty.
So that could end up leaving you with 72 to work with, for example, which again is not ideal. So you might be asking, well shouldn't I just minimize taxes and hold off on paying taxes for as long as possible? And the answer is not necessarily. So it could make sense to go ahead and pre pay some taxes by getting strategic, the reason for that is that you will eventually have to pay taxes on your pre tax money and it might happen in a big lump, and that can bump you up into the highest tax brackets, so it could be better to smooth out the rate at which you draw from those accounts and hopefully keep yourself in lower tax bracket, at least relatively speaking.
So when your RMDs or your required minimum distributions kick in after age 72 under current law, that could possibly bump you up into the highest tax brackets, maybe you want to smooth things out and take some income early. So let's look at the question of, Do you have enough with some specific numbers, and before we glance at those numbers, just want to mention that I am Justin Pritchard. I help people plan for retirement and invest for the future. I've got some good resources, I think, in the description below, some of the things that we've been talking about here today, as well as some general retirement planning information. So if this is on your mind, I think a lot of that is going to be really helpful for you. Please take a look at that and let me know what you think of what you find. It's also a good time for a friendly reminder, This is just a short video, I can't possibly cover everything.
So please triple and quadruple check with some professionals like a CPA or a financial advisor before you make any decisions, so let's get back into these questions, Do you have enough? As we always need to mention, it depends on where you are and how much you spend and how things work for you. Are you lucky to retire into a good market, or are you unlucky and retiring into a bad market? All of these different aspects are going to affect your success, but let's jump over to my financial planning tool and take a look at an example. This is just a hypothetical example, it's the world's most over simplified example, so please keep that in mind, with a real person, we've got a lot more going on. The world is a complicated place and things get messier, but we're keeping it very simple here, just to talk about an example of how things might look, so this person has one million in pre tax assets and 350,000 in a brokerage account, and if we just quickly glance at their dashboard here, pretty high probability of success, so let's make it a little bit more interesting and say…
Maybe that IRA has, let's say, 700,000 in it. What is that going to do? And by the way, this is still a lot more than a lot of people have, but again, if you're going to be retiring at 55, you typically have quite low expenses and/or a lot of assets. So let's keep in mind here that retirees don't necessarily spend at a flat inflation adjusted level, and I'll get into the assumptions here in a second, but let's just look at if this person spends at inflation minus 1% using the retirement spending "smile," that dramatically improves their chances, and I've got videos on why you might consider that as a potential reality, so you can look into that later at your leisure, but as far as the assumptions, we assume they spend about 50,000 a year, retire at age 55.
The returns are 5.5% per year, and inflation is 3% per year. Wouldn't that be refreshing if we got 3%… So we glance at their income here age 55, nothing, and then Social Security kicks in at 70. They're doing a Social Security bridge strategy. I've got videos on that as well, or at least one video, the full year kicks in here later, and then their Social Security adjust for inflation, looking at their taxes, we have zero taxes in these earlier years because they are just not pulling from those pre tax accounts. Maybe not getting much, if anything, in terms of capital gains, maybe their deduction is wiping that out, so we may have an opportunity here to actually do something and again, pre pay some taxes and pull some taxable income forward.
In fact, if we glance at their federal income tax bracket, you can see that it's fairly low from 55 on, maybe they want to pull some of this income forward so that later in life, they are drawing everything out of the pre tax accounts all at once. It just depends on what's important to you and what you want to try to do, and that brings us to some tips for doing calculations, whether you are doing this with somebody, a financial planner or on your own, you want to look at that gap between when you stop working and when your income benefits begin from, let's say, Social Security, there's also that gap between when you stop working and when Medicare starts, and that's another important thing to look at, but what are your strategies available there? Should you take some income, and exactly how much? That's going to be an area where you might have some control, so it's worth doing some good planning.
We also want to look closely at the inflation and investment returns, and what are the assumptions in any software that you're using, for example? These are really important inputs and they can dramatically change what happens… You saw what happened when we switched from a flat inflation adjusted increase each year to the retirement spending smile, just a subtle little adjustment has a big difference on how things unfold, and in that scenario, by the way, we would typically have healthcare increasing at a faster rate. But like I said, we use an over simplified example and didn't necessarily include that in this case, but you do want to click through or ask questions on what exactly are the assumptions and are you on board with those assumptions? You may also need to make some adjustments, and this is just the reality of retiring at an early age when you may have 30 plus years of retirement left, a lot can happen, and there really is a lot of benefit to making slight adjustments, especially during market crashes, for example, so. If things are not necessarily going great, some little tweaks could potentially improve the chances of success substantially, that might mean something as simple as skipping an inflation adjustment for a year or two, or maybe dialing back some vacation spending.
These are things you don't want to do, that's for sure, but with those little adjustments, you can potentially keep things on track, and that way you don't have to go back to work or make bigger sacrifices. And so I hope you found that helpful. If you did, please leave a quick thumbs up, thank you and take care..
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You’re Retiring. Now What? Retirement Planning: A Reassessment [2022]
Jason 0 Comments Retire Wealthy Retirement Planning Tips for Retiree's
[Music] Consuelo Mack: On WEALTHTRACK, why a reassessment
of retirement planning is in order. Christine Benz: Given how elevated the market
is and low return expectations for fixed incomes securities for stocks, the tricky part is
that people embarking on retirement today need to probably take less than that four
percent, they would probably need to start more in the range of three percent. [Music] Consuelo Mack: Morningstar's personal finance
guru Christine Benz joins us with her checklist on Consuelo Mack WEALTHTRACK. Announcer: Funding provided by ClearBridge
Investments, Morgan Le Fay Dreams Foundation, First Eagle Investment Management, Royce Investment
Partners, Matthews Asia and Strategas Asset Management. [Music] Consuelo Mack: Hello, and welcome to this
edition of WEALTHTRACK. I'm Consuelo Mack. One of the biggest changes of the past year
has been the record number of Americans who are quitting their jobs. It is so pronounced that it has a name. It's called the Great Resignation. The so-called quit rate has exceeded pre-pandemic
highs for months. Millions of Americans have walked out the
door. A sizable number are starting their own businesses. According to the Wall Street Journal, since
the pandemic began, the number of unincorporated self-employed workers has risen by more than
half a million to nearly 10 million, one of the highest levels in years, and the number
of applications for federal tax ID numbers to register new businesses soared to nearly
five million, the highest number on record.
Another huge contributor to the Great Resignation
is the surge in retirement. Since March of 2020, the number of adults
55 and older who retired was nearly two million more than the rate was pre-pandemic. What the Great Resignation means for retirement
planning is just one of the items on Christine Benz’s Financial To-Do List this year. Morningstar's Director of Personal Finance
is joining us for the 4th year in a row to help us get in personal financial shape. Benz, a WEALTHTRACK regular, is an acknowledged
personal finance guru. She has held the title of Morningstar's Director
of Personal Finance since 2008. She writes daily personal finance columns
for Morningstar, does interviews and podcasts, and is the author of several books, including
30 Minute Money Solutions, A Step-by-Step Guide to Managing Your Finances, and The Morningstar
Guide to Mutual Funds: Five Star Strategies for Success.
She has also been named to Barron's List of
100 Most Influential Women in U.S. Finance for the last two years. I began our conversation by asking her about
the impact the Great Resignation could have on retirement planning. Christine Benz: Well, I think there are a
few things that people who are hanging it up from work need to be thinking about with
respect to retirement planning. One is that there's, sort of, the standard
rule of thumb for thinking about whether you have enough for retirement, and that's called
the Four Percent Guideline. And it basically means, could you live on
four percent of your portfolio plus whatever income sources you might have? So if you're taking Social Security, you'd
have that too. The tricky part is that given how elevated
the market is and low return expectations for fixed income securities, for stocks, the
tricky part is that people embarking on retirement today need to probably take less than that
four percent.
They would probably need to start more in
the range of three percent. So I think people who are looking upon, drawing
upon their portfolio for their living expenses need to use that as a quick and dirty starting
point for assessing the viability of their retirement plans. Consuelo Mack: That's a big drop, Christine. I mean, from the four percent has been the,
kind of, the traditional assumption that you should plan on taking four percent of your
retirement savings, whatever, and that will last you for 30 years.
And, certainly, if you retire early, you're
going to have a longer retirement plan, but you're saying three percent, in general, now
that's the new standard? Christine Benz: Our research concluded that
if you have a 30-year time horizon, a balanced portfolio and you want to have like a 90 percent
probability of not running out of money during that 30-year time horizon, 3.3 percent is
a good starting point, that's probably overly precise I think if you were to be in that
three and a half percent range. But, certainly, people who have extended time
horizons, so people who expect to be retired for 40 or 50 years, and this would apply to
people in their 40s who are retiring today, they'd want to set that withdrawal rate even
lower, probably in the realm of two percent. And there, that starts to begin looking more
challenging in terms of, could you live on that amount? Consuelo Mack: And Christine, as far as the
Great Resignation is concerned and more and more people being self-employed, I mean, that
means they're not going to have a regular paycheck.
So the impact on retirement planning for someone
who's self-employed, what should they be thinking about? Christine Benz: Well, certainly, people who
are embarking on self-employment do have some vehicles that they can use to continue to
fund their own retirements. So IRAs, SEP IRAs for self-employed individuals. Health care, though, is a big wild card for
self-employed people, as you know.
And so I think it does make sense to really
make sure you have a good health care plan. I think that's one big impediment to people
being more entrepreneurial, that they're worried about how they will do for health care coverage. But oftentimes you do tend to see this trend
when people embark on self-employment, investing in their business comes first, and oftentimes
they do tend to short shrift their own retirement. So it's super important to keep that in mind. If you are self-employed, make sure that those
ongoing retirement plan contributions are part of your budget. Consuelo Mack: Christine, thinking about the
new three and a half percent withdrawal rate, there are some more flexible strategies that
you're suggesting. What are they? Christine Benz: Well, the name of the game
is that you want to be able to withdraw less if you happen to encounter a down market,
and that's particularly important in the early years of retirement.
There's this phenomenon that retirement researchers
call sequence of return risk or sequencing risk. And that basically means that you retire and
then encounter a lousy market environment right out of the box. That's the thing you worry about, and one
way that you can protect yourself against that is potentially taking less in those down
markets. So in our research, we tested a number of
different flexible strategies, and that's really a commonality among them. They help new retirees take a little bit more
initially than that 3.3 percent or 3.5 percent that we talked about, in exchange, though,
the trade-off is that as a retiree, you have to be prepared to take less.
So, one really simple tweak to, sort of, the
fixed real withdrawal system that underpins that four percent guideline or the 3.3 percent
guideline in our world is to simply forego inflation adjustments. So forgo inflation adjustments in the year
after your portfolio has endured a loss. We found that that is a really simple strategy
that actually does help enlarge retirees’ portfolios over their lifetime. There are a number of other, more complicated
strategies. Another one we looked at is called the guardrails
system. This was developed by financial planner Jonathan
Guyton and William Klinger, who's a computer scientist. It's a little bit more complicated. It ensures that the retiree takes less in
down markets, but in exchange, he or she can take more when the portfolio is up. So in environments like right now, you'd be
able to get a little bit of a raise because the market has been good. That strategy is more efficient. It means that the retiree consumes more of
his or her portfolio over the lifetime, but it also tends to leave less at the end.
So for people who are really bequest-minded,
such a strategy wouldn't be a great idea. Consuelo Mack: Talking about flexible strategies,
obviously we would take into account if we are eligible, our Social Security income stream,
which is inflation protected. But also, what about annuities, which in the
past have gotten a bad name, but that's another possible income stream possibility that we
should consider, right? Christine Benz: Absolutely. I think job one, even before you start thinking
about withdrawal rates, is to look at your non-portfolio income sources. Looking at Social Security, looking at an
annuity, possibly. And the reason is that we've got more and
more folks who are coming into retirement without the benefit of pensions. So the name of the game is to look at your
fixed cash flow needs, and then try to match them to non-portfolio income sources.
Annuities do have a bad name, and I think
rightfully so in some respects, largely because you've got some incredibly opaque, expensive
products, but there are also some really good annuities that do offer lifetime benefits. I tend to favor the very simple, plain vanilla
annuities that fixed immediate annuities or fixed deferred annuities where there's a lot
of transparency. For consumers, they tend to be lower cost
and you can easily comparison shop.
And I would also say, if you're thinking of
an annuity as part of your toolkit, don't go straight to the insurance company, go to
a fee-only financial planner. Get some objective guidance on whether that
makes sense for you, given your situation. But the important thing about annuities is
that, as an annuity purchaser, you benefit from what's called longevity risk pooling,
meaning that you are in the pool with other people. Some will die younger than expected, some
will live a lot longer. You hope you'll be one of the longer-lived
ones. And in so doing, you'll be able to enjoy a
larger sum of money out of that annuity than will people who die earlier.
Consuelo Mack: One of the criticisms of annuities
recently, even the fixed income annuities, is that interest rates are so low, so the
returns historically are low. Christine Benz: Well, that is a risk factor
that interest rates are very low, so, arguably, you're locking in a fairly low payout. So there are a couple of workarounds, one
would be to do a series of annuity purchases over a period of several years. But one other risk factor that I think does
loom large with annuities is inflation risk, which is certainly front and center for a
lot of people today, especially retirees. Most annuities do not offer an inflation adjustment
in that payout. So if we do see inflation run much higher
than it has historically, that would be a risk factor for new annuity buyers.
The main benefit of annuities is that longevity
risk pooling, and that does tend to elevate payouts from annuities quite substantially
above what you get with fixed rate investments. Consuelo Mack: Talk to us about of how we
protect ourselves and our portfolios against inflation. Christine Benz: Yeah. It's a huge topic today, obviously. I think it makes sense to kind of think of
this problem as two sides of a ledger. So I would start by looking at your expenditures,
and I often think about this column that Jason Zweig wrote probably a decade ago. He called it me-flation, and the idea is that
we don't experience inflation as CPI. We each have our own consumption basket, and
some people might have higher inflation because the stuff they're spending on is inflating
at a higher rate than CPI. Some people may have lower rates of inflation. So, really, take stock of how you're spending
your money.
If you're a homeowner, the nice thing about
that is that at least your housing costs are somewhat inflation protected. You may have sort of ancillary housing costs
if you're paying people to do things around your house or your home heating costs may
be going up, but at least your, sort of, main big ticket housing expense is locked down. Health care costs have historically been inflating
higher than the general inflation rate. The good news is that, right now at least,
health care costs do appear to be running below CPI, which is somewhat rare and it may
— Consuelo Mack: It is.
Christine Benz: — sort of reverse itself. So think about how you're spending your money
and then turn your attention to whether you are protected in terms of where you're getting
your income. So if you are someone who is earning a paycheck
and you're eligible for cost-of-living adjustments, well, those are, at least in part, making
you whole with respect to inflation, they're helping you keep up with CPI. In a worst-case scenario, say you are a retiree
and you're drawing exclusively from a portfolio of fixed rate investments for your withdrawals,
for your income, you're not at all inflation protected.
And you really need to think about, well,
how can I protect this plan? How can I protect my withdrawals from inflation? And that's where I think stocks serve a great
role. They're by no means any sort of direct inflation
hedge, but they, over time, do tend to have higher returns than inflation, which is one
reason why I think even older retirees would probably want to make room for stocks as a
component of their portfolio. Within the bond piece of your portfolio, if
you're retired, especially, I think it makes sense to consider Treasury Inflation Protected
Securities or i-bonds. And these are basically Treasury bonds that
give you a little bit of a nudge up in terms of your principal and in turn your income
when we see inflation running up. Consuelo Mack: Another suggestion, Christine,
that you've sent me on your to-do-list is the fact how essential it is to look at your
portfolio and consider rebalancing your portfolio.
U.S. stocks have done really well, U.S. growth
stocks have done really well and stocks in general have done well versus bonds. Is this a good time to rebalance? Christine Benz: I think it is. I'll keep banging this drum. I think I said that a year ago, too, and yet
we've seen kind of a similar performance pattern. U.S. stocks have performed very, very well,
but I do think that this is a nice way, without having to get too cute about timing the market,
this is a nice way to ensure that your portfolio's risk level stays in line with your targets. Annually, take a look at your asset allocation
relative to your target. If you're retired, I think the good news is
that we've had a strong stock market and your cash flow needs for the next couple of years
are probably hiding in plain sight in terms of your appreciated equity assets. Think about taking some money off the table
there, plowing it into safe investments that you can live on and that will give you peace
of mind, you'll leave a good share of your portfolio in stocks and it will give you peace
of mind to be patient with them if they do encounter some volatility.
Consuelo Mack: We're talking about rebalancing
and taking profits in a highly appreciated asset class and shifting them over to one
that hasn't appreciated as much, but that's going to involve taxes. Christine Benz: Right. Consuelo Mack: So talk to us about the tax
considerations. Christine Benz: It's crucial to be thoughtful
about this and to the extent that you have tax deferred or other tax advantaged assets,
it really does make sense to focus those activities in those accounts because you can trade all
day long. Not that you should, but you could trade a
lot and not incur any taxes, even if you're selling appreciated winners. So the good news is that, for many retirees,
the bulk of their assets do reside in tax sheltered vehicles where they can make those
changes.
They might owe taxes on the distributions
that they take, but the repositioning would not entail any taxes. If you're a younger investor, not yet retired,
focus those rebalancing activities within your tax-sheltered accounts. Also take care with respect to converting
IRA assets, traditional IRA assets, to Roth. You sometimes hear that that's a good strategy. Be careful about doing that when the market
is elevated, because the taxes that you'll owe on those conversions will depend on your
gains, the size of your balance and the amount that you're converting. So get some tax help. Whether you're doing this repositioning to
get your portfolio back into balance or whether you're doing IRA conversions, get another
set of eyes on what the tax implications might be.
Consuelo Mack: And another tax friendly strategy
is, of course, charitable donations, right? Christine Benz: So true. Consuelo Mack: Yeah. Christine Benz: The charitable contributions
of appreciated securities. You can do that at any age. You can actually get a donor advised fund
into the act where you can donate those appreciated securities, even employer stock to a donor
advised fund. And the beauty of that is that you can take
your time and be deliberate about making those charitable contributions. You can direct those contributions over time. Older adults who are required to take minimum
distributions from their IRAs can also use what's called a qualified charitable distribution,
where they donate a portion of their RMDs to charity. There's a little bit of a disconnect with
the ages, you can start the QCD, the qualified charitable distribution, at age 70 and a half.
RMDs kick in at age 72. So if you're 70 and a half, start looking
at this strategy, it's absolutely phenomenal and it is a way to lower your tax bill and
also lower the amount of balance that will be subject to required minimum distributions
down the line. Consuelo Mack: For those still working, you
check your retirement plan contributions. So talk to us about what's changed this year
from last year. Christine Benz: We're seeing a little bit
of an increase in 401K, 403B, 457 contribution limits. So going up to 20,500 in 2022 for people who
are under age 50. If you're over 50, you can take $27,000 in
terms of 401K contributions. So if you haven't revisited those contributions
that you're making, check to see if you're on track to make the maximum allowable contributions.
IRA contributions are staying the same for
2022, but take a look at whether you are on track to max out your IRA contributions. I love the idea of automating those just as
you do with 401K contributions, where you're signing on the dotted line with your IRA provider
to make ongoing contributions. The nice thing is, is that you can just invisibly
make those contributions. It doesn't give you time to equivocate about
whether it's a good time to make those contributions.
They just come right out of your checking
account. Consuelo Mack: We've had a 10 year — longer
than 10-year bull market now. For retirement planning, what are the risks? I mean, are there psychological risks to having
this prolonged bull market? Christine Benz: I think it's a good news,
bad news story. So we were talking earlier about that lower
withdrawal rate that is in order. The good news is it's a lower withdrawal rate
on a larger balance for many retirees. So it may translate into a higher dollar withdrawal
than would have been the case 5 years ago, because if you've been investing, if you've
been in the stock market, you've enjoyed that nice appreciation, but it is a lower percentage.
But I do think the psychological aspect of
this is huge, Consuelo, because a lot of retirees have been through many market downdrafts. And so their risk tolerance, their comfort
level with risk is higher than it will ever be during their lifetime, just as they're
embarking on retirement. The problem is their risk capacity, their
ability to absorb that risk, as they get into drawdown mode, as they get into drawing upon
their portfolios, that's actually diminished a little bit. So it's an odd disconnect, and I think it's
important to keep in mind the distinction between risk tolerance.
It may be high at retirement. Risk capacity is lower because you're going
to be starting to draw upon that portfolio, and you certainly don't want to be drawing
upon a 100 percent equity portfolio. You want to have safer assets that you could
draw upon if a bad market materializes especially early on in your retirement. Consuelo Mack: So the common wisdom is as
you get closer to retirement is to increase your defensive assets, and even though bonds
don't feel like they're defensive, that that's what we should be doing, and cash, certainly,
which has been really criticized and kind of diminished as far as Wall Street is concerned,
its value, but it can be quite valuable. So that type of strategy is still in place
as you get closer to retirement or in retirement is to increase your defensive assets.
Christine Benz: Very much so. The way I think about it is, given how low
yields are, it's not return on capital. You will not get much in terms — Consuelo Mack: Right. Christine Benz: — of a yield or a return
from these investments. In fact, current yields are really good predictor
of what you're able to earn from fixed income assets over the next decade. Well, that's a low return, but it is return
of principle that we know, especially during equity market downdrafts, we know that high
quality fixed income securities tend to hold up relatively well during those periods, and
that's really what you're looking for. You're looking for something that will hold
stable during that period when you're needing to spend from it. So I do think that the rule of thumb or the
thought about de-risking a portfolio as retirement draws close absolutely still holds up Consuelo Mack: One investment for a long term
diversified portfolio, Christine, what would you have us all on some of? Christine Benz: Well, we've been talking about
inflation protection and worries about inflation, and so I do think that people who are looking
at retirement and getting close to spending from their portfolios might consider an investment
in Treasury Inflation Protected Securities.
And one fund I like of this ilk is Vanguard
Short-Term Inflation Protected Securities. It is a very low-cost product. It's very conservative, so your return will
not be great over your holding period, but it will do a good job of defending against
inflation. And unlike some other Treasury Inflation Protected
Funds, it tends to not be very interest rate sensitive, so it invests in short-term Treasury
Inflation Protected Securities. So it tends not to be buffeted around by interest
rates. And that's a good thing, especially if you're
worried about inflation. We often see higher interest rates go hand
in hand with inflation. And so in such a product, in a short-term
TIPS Fund, you'll be relatively protected from some of the interest rate related volatility
that often accompanies longer term TIPS Funds. Consuelo Mack: All right, Christine Benz,
thanks so much for joining us — Christine Benz: Thank you, Consuelo. Consuelo Mack: — with your annual to do list. Christine Benz: It's my pleasure. Consuelo Mack: It’s always our pleasure
as well. Thanks, Christine. Christine Benz: Thank you so much. [Music] Consuelo Mack: At the close of every WEALTHTRACK,
we try to give you one suggestion to help you build and protect your wealth over the
long term.
This week's Action Point is think twice before
joining the Great Resignation Movement. As we just discussed, retirement tends to
be longer and more expensive than most of us realize. Early retirement can really put a dent in
your retirement income. Self-employment is very appealing, but it
does have some drawbacks. Lack of a regular paycheck, benefits and matching
401K contributions, plus all of the backup services we take for granted. Offices, supplies, tech support, etc. are
expensive. It pays to do some hard analysis with family,
friends and advisors before walking out the door. Next week, Social Security guru Mary Beth
Franklin updates us on managing that crucial retirement program and other strategies to
maximize retirement income. In this week's extra feature, what keeps Christine
Benz motivated as the incredibly busy multitasking head of personal finance at Morningstar.
For those of you active in social media, please
follow us on Facebook, Twitter and our YouTube channel. Thanks for sharing your precious time with
us. Have a super weekend and make the week ahead
a healthy, profitable and productive one. [Music].

The 5 Most Important Years Of Your Retirement
Jason 0 Comments Retire Wealthy Retirement Planning Tips for Retiree's
as a parent when you have your first child there's no shortage of people to remind you just how important the first five years are of your child's development unfortunately there's no similar Network there's no similar information source for us as we retire what are the most important five years of your retirement so I'm gonna hope to break that with today's video let's go for a walk and I'll I'll share my thoughts with you with you having been a fee only financial advisor for over 20 years now and I'll I'll cut right to the chase I think the most important years just like with your child are the first five years and I want to share that you know this is a big transition if you're thinking about retiring if you're getting close to retiring this is a big transition you think about like you know a long time ago maybe when you first left home whether you went to college or you developed a trade and you went off on your own to start quote unquote adulting the transition from high school to college where you put everything you own in a couple suitcases and you say goodbye to the the people that have been nurturing you for for your entire life that's a big big transition I'm sorry that background noise is a train you really can't see it but it's there okay so that's a big transition and the transition to retirement is every bit as big right I mean it's it's the whole world that you've known for a long long time and just like with a teenager uh or a young adult heading off to college your identity is about to change as well so you know the it's a big transition but it's important that you jump in with both feet it's important that you start off on the right track and you know one of the keys is is to understand what your goals are what your hope you know what you're going to stand for what you're hoping to do in retirement not that you have to have a to-do list but you know these are the things that are important to me as I retire and you can update them for instance for me um for me I I kind of when my day comes to retire I'm not retired yet but when my day comes to retire the things that I have thought about that are going to be important to me and are important to me now are number one relationships um you know when you work unfortunately you're not able to spend as much time with the people that you love and you care about so I'm hoping to spend more time with my adult children I'm hoping to spend more time with my wife and with with friends that mean a lot to me that unfortunately right now I'm not able to spend a lot of time with so I want to spend a fourth of my time on relationships I want to spend a fourth of my time on my health having your health is really key once you lose your health you know it's a retirement's gonna look very different for you so doing what I can to eat in a healthy way to work out regularly to keep my health is going to be important then I've always been a lifelong Learners so I want to continue to learn so a fourth of my time on relationships a fourth of my time on my health a fourth of my time just learning I just love learning and then a fourth of my time as a teacher and that's part of what this YouTube channel is is is giving back and and sharing with folks I'm fortunate what I've spent my life my life's work is something that uh brings value to a lot of folks it's not it feels like common sense to me because I've been doing it my whole adult life just like whatever you've been doing most of your adult life probably feels like common sense to you so it's important to jump in with both feet it's important not to be frugal you don't have a financial plan and know what your goals are and you know many regular viewers of my channel right we're good Savers um we're good at identifying what our goals are and saving towards those but I don't want you to be frugal and it's natural I'd say well over half of people you know whatever their budget is whatever their plan says that they can spend they end up you know still saving 25 or 30 percent of that and don't do that right it's it your whole life has been a balance between current you and future you and now this is your future your uh the future you so be sure to spend that money and enjoy it these are your healthiest most active years uh I also think it's uh it's it's good to have a financial plan if you don't have a plan boy it's really hard to know how much money you can spend and you know a lot of people are sacrificing unnecessarily you don't want to do that you don't have to do that so have a financial plan and have a plan a time plan um that I already talked about right think about how am I going to spend my time 24 hours a day is a lot of time right a significant part of our life has been spent at work okay other reasons why the first five years are super important there's some big decisions that need to be made in the first five years let's say you're 60 and um and you're retiring early a lot of viewers of my channel are hoping to do that or you're 62 or 63 you know there's some big decisions that need to be made between you know let's the first let's say 60 to 67 60 to 68 even above that but you know Medicare Medicare is not as easy as just raising your hand saying hey government you know I'm 65 years old now I'd like my medic I'd like my medicare right you have to decide do you want your uh traditional Medicare or do you want what's called Medicare Advantage which is a great marketing name uh traditional Medicare is provided by the government Medicare advantages is provided by a private company and you can change your mind on that but if you go with traditional Medicare uh it has a twenty dollar deductible for Medicare Part B and you can you can buy Medicare gap insurance and normally outside of a few exceptions you have to go through medical underwriting to be approved so if you have a pre-existing condition an insurance company can deny you the meta the Medigap insurance but when you first qualify for Medicare I am not a Medicare specialist but you have a six about a six month window where you don't have to go through the medical underwriting you get an exemption for that so that's a big decision also when you're going to start taking Med uh when you're going to start taking social security is a big decision so the first five years are important another reason is because you've got these big decisions that you have to make and then unfortunately this is just a reality that we all face in the first five years we Face what's called sequence of return risk it turns out that having negative returns having bad stock market returns in the early years of our retirement are have some of the biggest impact as to whether our financial plan is successful or not and none of us know what the first five years are going to be like but that's one of the reasons that the first five years is so important another thing that's important if you're interested in this topic is to watch this video up here that talks about five reasons to uh it talks about I'm sorry average income for retirees and this video down here that talks about five reasons to retire as soon as you can thanks for watching bye bye

How Much Money You Should Have Saved At Every Age | Retirement Savings By Age
Jason 0 Comments Retire Wealthy Retirement Planning Tips for Retiree's
hey everyone this is lauren mack with hack in the rat race when it comes to retirement and strategies for saving for retirement people often ask how much money should i have saved at every age in order to reach my retirement goals this can be a very difficult question to answer because so much depends on one's lifestyle age in which they want to retire goals during retirement and so on in this video i'm going to talk about how much money you should have saved at every age for a typical american planning for retirement if you stay until the end of this video i am going to share with you a tip that you might be able to use in order to dramatically reduce the amount of savings you will need in retirement and possibly reduce the amount of time you'll have to work in order to get there additionally if you watch this video and think you're behind or maybe you haven't even started saving then i have created a workbook called from xero to retirement which walks you step by step through getting your finances in order and saving for retirement i'll put a link to it in the show notes below so let's jump right in the key to having enough money to live comfortably in retirement is to start saving as early as possible this means starting in your 20s most people in their 20s are just embarking on their careers whether that's freelancing in the digital economy starting a business entering a trade or finishing up college and starting a career either way people in their 20s usually have very little save for retirement and more often not can find themselves in debt due to school loans training startup costs or even entering the workforce and that is okay if you happen to be someone in your twenties who has managed to avoid debt and have money saved then congratulations you are ahead of the curve the best piece of financial advice i could give someone in their 20s is to start creating good financial habits while in your 20s because it will be a tremendous benefit throughout your life at this age there really is no specific amount that you should have saved although the more the better i usually recommend that if you're in your 20s you should at least have an emergency fund of one to two months worth of expenses saved up the reason having an emergency fund is that it can help you avoid falling into the debt trap i actually recommend that people of all ages have an emergency fund set aside that is easily accessible in cash so this is a good habit to begin early speaking of debt many people in their 20s are fresh out of school finally making some good money and it can be very tempting to rush out and finance and purchase a fancy car maybe some designer clothes or even a sweet bachelor pad but avoid the temptation to do that of course when you're just starting out there are necessities such as getting a car to get you to work or maybe suitable clothing for work however it's important to try not to live beyond your means or max out your credit cards many times when you do get your first job one of the benefits offered to employees is a company sponsored retirement account like a 401k oftentimes the company match meaning to a certain percentage the company will match the amount you put in so if the company match is 5 then if you put in 5 they will match your 5 i always recommend signing up for a corporate sponsor retirement account in my videos and i always suggest contributing at least up to what the company will match because this is like getting free money and it's considered part of your compensation package what if you work for yourself as a freelancer entrepreneur or work for a company that simply doesn't offer a retirement account then i recommend opening an ira or roth ira and contributing to the annual maximum limit ira stands for individual retirement account if you want to learn more about the difference between 401ks iras and raw diaries i created a video called roth ira versus traditional ira versus 401k i'll link to it above and in the show notes below to sum it up life in your 20s should be all about establishing good money habits make sure you have an emergency fund of at least one to two months of expenses three to six months would be ideal set up a retirement account either through an employer-sponsored 401k or your own ira or roth ira and lastly make sure to avoid the debt trap live within your means the more you can start investing early on as possible the sooner you'll be able to retire so now let's talk about your 30s by now you've most likely been in the workforce for a while and hopefully things are progressing well with your chosen occupation many experts recommend by the time you reach 30 years old you should have one year of salary saved up so for example if your annual salary is fifty thousand dollars a year then you should have fifty 000 saved up and invested this amount of savings should be in addition to the three to six months of savings that should be tucked away in your emergency fund in order to protect you from falling into the debt trap because of job loss medical bills car repair speaking of debt by the time you reach 30 you really should try to eliminate what i consider bad debt some examples of these are credit card debt car loans student loans etc paying on these types of debt each and every month prevents you from investing the difference and limits your ability to further invest and contribute to grow your nest egg as you saw in the earlier example in your 30s it can be tempting to keep up with joneses and live beyond your means many of your friends and acquaintances will take out large loans to buy an expensive home they'll borrow large sums of money in order to buy a luxury automobile in order to give the illusion of wealth avoid falling into this trap and feel tempted to compete with these people by making the same mistakes 98 of the time these wealthy people are actually highly leveraged and truly broke the best way to get out of the rat race meet your retirement goals and even retire early and wealthy is to live frugally and within your means okay so now you've reached 40 and you've managed to not succumb to the debt trap that so many people fall into in their 30s you should be more financially stable than you were in your 30s so how much should you have saved for retirement by now well most experts recommend that you have three times your annual salary saved up so for example if you make sixty thousand dollars a year you should have a hundred and eighty thousand dollars saved up and invested in addition to this should be maxing out your contributions to your retirement account that we've been talking about that is really important not only to help grow your investment but contributions to your retirement account can decrease your overall tax liability it is also a good idea at 40 to buy a house home ownership is really important because home values tend to rise over time if you buy a home at age 40 with a 30-year mortgage and make all your payments your home will be paid off by the time you're 70 and you've reached retirement therefore reducing housing expenses in retirement once your home is paid off then it becomes an asset this also gives you the option of selling it once you reach retirement downsizing paying cash for a new property that's worth less than the value of your home therefore giving you the extra cash to help you pay for your retirement another benefit of owning a home or rental properties is leverage which is the mortgage if you put twenty thousand dollars down on two hundred fifty thousand dollar house and the value rises ten percent then your returns twenty 25 000 instead a 10 return on 20 000 is 2 000 as you reach 50 years old many people are well established in their career and hopefully have managed to get a few raises over the years and are now making even more money at this point you should save around five times your annual salary so if you make sixty thousand dollars a year then you should have three hundred thousand dollars saved for retirement you should really be noticing the compound interest effects now due to all that diligent savings over the years once you turn 50 years old the irs allows you to start making catch-up contributions to your retirement accounts which means you're allowed to contribute higher limits to the annual contributions so you should be taking advantage of this in order to grow your retirement account quicker and also reduce your overall tax liability another recommendation at this age is to continue to remain debt free live frugally and continue to pay down your mortgage by age 60 now you're getting close to retirement by this age it is recommended to have seven to eight times your annual salary saved up so if you make sixty thousand dollars a year then you should have four hundred and eighty thousand dollars saved for retirement you're probably debt free now and really enjoying watching your savings and investments grow at this point it might be tempting to start dipping into your retirement savings however avoid doing this keep up the study savings pace many people are still working and earning great incomes in their 60s and can really boost their retirement accounts if they have fallen behind in the early years hopefully by now your home is either paid off or close to being paid off which should give you peace of mind as of now you should be eligible for social security benefits but you might want to put that off as long as possible to be able to receive the maximum amount of money you can go to the social security website they have a form where you can enter your information and it will give you estimates of what to expect at different ages i'll put a link to it in the show notes below you'll be able to determine at what point it makes sense to take it out and how much will be added for waiting and if you're just starting out saving for retirement and you're still relatively young don't assume you will have social security benefits when you reach your 60s or 70s many experts debate whether they'll actually be enough money to pay out those benefits in the future now for the bonus tip like i said at the beginning of this video having enough money for retirement depends mostly on your lifestyle cost of living and retirement in america however these days more and more people are choosing to retire outside the united states where the cost of living is dramatically less and they can have a much better standard of living for substantially cheaper than the us the thought of retiring abroad might sound frightening to some people and i get it but i have traveled to over 58 countries and lived all over the world and i can tell you that you might be quite surprised retiring abroad is not unusual in fact many americans choose to either retire early to stretch their retirement savings even further by joining the ever growing list of american expats who are deciding to retire abroad many countries around the world entice retirees by offering retirement visas to come spend their golden years enjoying the beaches golf courses and laid-back lifestyle in their country i personally know so many people who have chosen this option and none of them have regretted it you're probably thinking oh lauren what about the health care overseas it cannot be as good as the u.s well my husband and i have received medical care in numerous countries all over the world including emergency surgeries from countries in southeast asia south america mexico europe and i can tell you that every time we receive medical care it has been as good or better than the care we received in america and the bill was certainly much less expensive if this sounds appealing to you then take a few scouting trips to some countries where you think you may want to live and spend some time checking it out and meeting up with some expats that live there to get their impression of what it's like to retire abroad in the country that you're considering now i want to hear from you in the comments section would you like me to do a video on retiring abroad have you been considering moving abroad to retire if so where let me know in the comments below if you're watching this video and you're thinking lauren i am so far behind or i haven't even started is it too late then watch this video right here
5 Easy Tips To 💰Save Money💰…Money Saving Hacks
Jason 0 Comments Tips for Retiree's
I’m going to do a video on 5 simple things you can do to help your financial situation and I realized that I need to do a follow-up to the retired at 40 story video because there’s a huge need for financial education in this country and really everywhere it pertains to every single person doesn’t matter what your financial status is you can always use help and there’s always little tip tips and tricks that and things that you can do to better your status it always amazes me how scared people are to talk about their finances to put something on paper to basically take a look at where their money is going what’s getting saved and how everything is getting spent and I’ve met people time and time again that are highly educated very smart people but they know nothing about finances and they are terrible with money management so before we get into the 5 tips I want to strongly urge you to make a financial statement for yourself figure out where your money is going currently and figure out how much you’re saving and basically figure out where you can trim the fat for so many people a financial statement or just finances in general is like a bad word they’re just terrified of it but the only way that you’re gonna be able to improve your finances is to face the music alright so now that you’ve had a chance to go through your financial statement you definitely know where your money is going but how can we save more and what you really need to aim for is about 6 months of reserves especially if you’re getting ready to invest money into something or if you’re doing some kind of career change or some life-changing thing and all of these five tips will more than likely be a line-item on your financial statement so let’s go to financial tip number one hey I’m going to have to call you back I’m shooting a video right now so this first thing is something that we’ve all become very very accustomed to in the last 10 to 15 years and that is a cell phone and people tend to spend absurd amounts on their cell phones whether it’s the bill or the cell phone itself mainly the cell phone itself so that’s my first financial tip is shop on eBay or Amazon for a cell phone that’s refurbished or used or one this may be just a couple years old I actually just purchased a cell phone on ebay because I’m having trouble with my current one and I got on to my cell phone providers website and the most expensive phone that’s like mine now is $1,200 that’s insane to me so I got on eBay I found one that’s similar to the one I have right now it’s new but it’s a couple years old and I got it for less than $200 another thing that you can do is ask for some kind of loyalty benefit from your cell phone provider cell phone providers are constantly trying to earn your business and if you’ve been with them for a long time and you can convince them to keep you around by offering you some kind of benefit they’ll jump on the chance just by going into my provider recently I have a cell phone bill that was about a hundred and ten dollars a month I told them that I’ve been with them for close to 15 years they knocked it down to sixty-seven dollars and I have unlimited everything now tip number two is what I call going to youtube University or getting a YouTube education we live in the most amazing time ever right now there is information everywhere and it’s so easily accessible don’t ever stop educating yourself it’s so easy to find out how to do things these days you’re doing yourself a huge disservice if you don’t take advantage of that so how does that pertain to saving money well you can save money by doing tons and tons of things yourself instead of paying someone else to do it just look at the platform that you’re watching right now for instance you’re watching a video on how to do something so that how-to can be anything from changing brake pads on your car to changing the oil on your car to fixing a leaky faucet or the toilet flapper not working on your toilet all the way to how to the meal which brings me to my next point number three so food is a necessity in life but is it a necessity to go out to eat or go to Starbucks once or twice or every day the amount of money that people spend on food and going out to eat fast food Starbucks McDonald’s it really adds up quick and I don’t think that people realize how much money they’re actually spending on it because it’s just five or six or seven dollars here and there but if you add that up over the course of a month or a year or five years or ten years I think the result would be pretty staggering cook your meals at home pack your lunch for work make that fancy coffee at home it’s not that tough to do there’s so many great ideas and resources on YouTube and Pinterest and vlogs and blogs this channel included if you need a place to start scroll through my channel I have lots of cooking videos if you want to take that a step farther you can start growing your own food and if you don’t have a big green house like this you can grow a lot of food just in five gallon buckets even on a little deck if you don’t know where to get started see tip two number four is something that really hits home for me because me and my wife are both self-employed and we have been for 15 plus years so number four is insurance and although I don’t like insurance companies because I think they’re a giant scam it’s a necessary evil and you can also use that to your advantage you can put them against each other insurance companies much like cell phone companies are begging for your business and they’re constantly trying to outdo each other with with certain benefits or promotions so make them put their money where their mouth is and put them up against each other constantly and not just insurance companies you can do this with all kinds of different companies you should always be price checking these companies the ball is in your court make them earn your business all right I’d saved the best for last tip number five is taking advantage of bank account and credit card bonuses and this tip is begging for a separate video all on its own because I could go on about this for a long time but if you’re not taking advantage of credit card bonuses for sign ups or credit card cash back or travel miles or if you sign up for a bank account a lot of them will give you a large sum just for putting your money with them now I want to be clear I’m not promoting just going out and spending a bunch of money on a credit card but more putting the things that you already spend money on into the credit card it’s money that you’re spending anyways put your mortgage on a credit card if you can insurance is a good one it’s not super expensive but at least we’ll get you a couple hundred bucks on your credit card unless of course it’s health insurance and then you’re talking in my case thousand to twelve hundred dollars a month here’s another good one groceries it’s something that you always have to have and depending on how much you go to the grocery store it could add up to three or four hundred bucks a month sometimes six hundred maybe even more no-brainer here put your gas on a credit card you can always put your utilities on your credit card too if your utility company will allow it next from tip one your cell phone bill now depending on how much some of these are and if you are allowed to actually put them on your credit card you’re talking some pretty major money that you can get a bonus from if you’re getting two percent cashback that really adds up not only that but you’re increasing your credit score while you’re doing that so as long as you’re financially responsible and you pay this every month you’re reaping a large benefit a lot of credit cards will give you a 2% cashback they’ll give you a $500 signup bonus that’s free money in my opinion the free bank bonuses or even better than the credit card in my opinion because the bank account is something that you have to have anyway a lot of them will give you $500 for a small deposit as long as you put your direct deposit with them all the way up to I’ve seen $1,000 before and if you have a little bit more money to play with some of the online money market accounts like Capital One will pay you up to 2% or some even up to 2.5% just for keeping your money with them so some of these things may not seem like it’s saving you a ton of money but when you take up those extra fives and tens and occasional hundreds and you put them to work for you as opposed to something that you’re normally spending you’re not only saving the money because you’re not spending it but you’re putting it to work and doing something else with it and you’ll find that your your finances will start to collect very quickly so if you found the video helpful and you enjoyed the content take a second to give me a thumbs up it really helps out the channel and it helps the YouTube algorithm get this video out to people who actually need to see it also don’t forget to subscribe we do some gardening some frugal living some food preservation and cooking some gardening and you get to join me and my family on our retirement at the age of 40 after you’ve clicked subscribe click the bell notification also and it will notify you every time a new video comes out and it’ll keep you in the loop of the community all right I appreciate you sticking with me through this whole video so I’m gonna give you an extra bonus tip with an extra 100 or 200 or 300 or more dollars per month that you’re saving with just cutting back on a few things you take that extra money and you pay down debt with it the faster you get out of debt the closer you’re going to become to financial freedom and whenever you’re paying off debt always choose the smallest balance first because it gives you that extra little boost and if you can pay it off faster it gives you that extra bit of confidence to rock into the next one so once you’ve paid down your smallest debt move on to your next smallest debt take that money that you’re saving from the smallest debt that you’re not having to pay any more and add it to the money you’re saving from the 5 tips that I’m giving you and apply it to the next smallest debt and when that one’s paid off you roll it into the next one you roll that one into the next one and so on and so on in the meantime this is retired at 40 check out these other helpful videos if you have a minute remember to live a life simple and we’ll catch you next week oh hey I’m gonna have to call you back and shooting a video right now this is right my god get out of debt
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