Tag: rule of 55
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..
Read MoreCan 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..
Read MoreCan 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..
Read MoreHow to Avoid Tax on Retirement Withdrawals
Jason 0 Comments Retire Wealthy Retirement Planning Tips for Retiree's
When you use money from pre tax retirement accounts, you generally owe income tax, but there are several ways to potentially avoid or at least reduce those taxes, so that's what we'll talk about in the next couple of minutes here, but first, it's important to acknowledge that there might not be a perfect solution for you as things get more intricate or you start to pursue these sort of too good to be true strategies, you may be setting yourself up for trouble, so do what you can to manage your taxes, but at some point, it may just be a nice problem to have, one potential solution is if you have an income that's low enough for the year, you might not owe any taxes, that might happen if you only work for part of the year, for example, maybe you are retiring or going to school or something happens like that. For example, you've got as a single person, let's say 13000 or so, have standard deduction if your income is low enough, and let's say you take out 8000 from a pre tax account, that would all be included in your income, 5000 of earnings from work plus 8000 here gets you up to 13000, but your taxable income would be zero, you will notice though that there's an other tax here of 800, that's because this person is under the age of 59 and half, so they still owe that 10% penalty tax for early distributions.
However, if they can qualify for an exception or if you're over the age of 59.5, that would not apply and your total tax might be zero, you can even get strategic about this, so if you know that you're going to have a low income here next year, you might wait to take a distribution, maybe it's November or December when you realize you want some money, and if you can wait until January of the next year, that's great. Or maybe you split distributions and take some of what you need in December and take the rest in January, and that might help you stay in low tax brackets, or even a 0% tax bracket, Roth distributions are another potential way to get money out tax free, so you already paid income tax on your contributions, those should come out tax free, but you need to be mindful of any earnings in your Roth accounts.
It's important to distinguish between Roth IRAS and Roth 401K. So when pulling money out of a Roth IRA, the ordering rules say that you can take out your regular contributions first before you get into any earnings, but that's not the case with Roth 401k. Those Roth distributions come out pro rata, meaning you'll have to include some earnings in every distribution, assuming you have any earnings, and you don't get to pull out the most tax favored dollars first, whenever you're talking about Roth distributions, you want to find out if you're making a qualified distribution and a qualified distribution generally requires that you've had the account open for five years or more, and you're over age 59.5, now, death and disability also qualify. And if you're moving money over to an IRA, things can look different as well, but this is the type of research you want to do, find out if you can make a qualified distribution, of course, the option for using Roth might not matter if you've spent your whole life putting in pre tax money, and of course, you did have to pay taxes when you make those contributions, so again, nothing is perfect here, like I said, you've either paid it sooner or later, but these are ways to potentially manage your taxes today.
Next on the list of not perfect solutions is a 401K loan, so when you borrow from your 401K, you don't owe taxes on that withdrawal as long as you repay the loan on time, but if you don't repay, any unpaid amount may be treated as a distribution and that's subject to taxes and maybe early withdrawal penalties, plus with loans, you really need to be careful about leaving your job or losing your job, so you might be required to repay the outstanding loan balance when you stop working for your employer, but you might not have those funds available to just pay off a loan in a lump sum, that's probably why you borrowed in the first place, in some cases, it is possible to offset the loan amount by contributing the money to an IRA later, but those rules can be complicated, and again, you just need a lump sum of money to pay off the loan, if you're going to do that…
What about that Mandatory tax withholding? When you take a cash distribution from a 401k, the plan typically has to withhold 20% of the gross amount and send that over to the IRS, and that's an advance payment or a deposit on your eventual tax bill for the year, it's not necessarily the exact amount you owe… It's just a deposit. You might owe more, you might owe less… That's problematic if you need the full amount that's in your 401k, if you can't afford to do without that 20%, so as a potential solution, you could move all of that money out of the 401K over to an IRA, an individual retirement account that you control and then from there, you can take distributions using whatever tax withholding level you want, it might be 20%, 10% or zero, again, remember that you may owe taxes on that later, and not withholding enough could end up in there being a big tax bill later in the year and possibly some under payment penalties, so there are a couple of pitfalls with that strategy, and you also need to be able to take a distribution from your 401k that might not be possible unless you have left your job.
So it's important to look at all these details. By the way, I'm Justin Pritchard, and I help people plan for retirement and invest for the future, and I'm going to put some resources in the description below, more on this topic about these taxes on 401 withdrawals, IRA withdrawals, I think you'll find that helpful, there will also be some general retirement planning information, just big picture stuff that I think will be really helpful, so be sure to check that out, and it's also a good time to remember, this is just a short video, we're not covering everything here, it's just kind of some food for thought, so definitely do some more research, triple check everything and talk to a professional before you make any decisions, so what if your main concern is the penalty tax, you're under age 59 and half, and you're taking a distribution, what are some ways to at least avoid that, even if you have to pay income taxes? One solution might be the so called rule of 55, this can allow you to get money out of a retirement account without paying the early withdrawal tax penalty.
So you have to leave your job at age 55 or later, and if you use the money from that Job's, 401K or 403B, Not a different job, but that job that you left at 55 or later, you can use that money without the early withdrawal penalty. You still typically owe income taxes if it's a taxable distribution, that age can go even lower for public safety workers, there's also the 72t or substantially equal periodic payments, for example, that would allow you to take a series of payments from your pre tax accounts, and you can start those before age 59 1/2, getting the money without the early withdrawal penalty, but the strategy can be kind of rigid and complicated, you have to do it for at least five years, or age 59 and a half, whichever is longer, and if you make any kind of little mistake, which is easy to do, then you could derail the whole strategy and you would retroactively owe taxes.
You have to be very careful with that one, but it might be a solution. There are also 457 plans out there that don't have an early withdrawal penalty, so if you have a governmental 457 B, for example, you should be able to take withdrawals at any age without an early distribution penalty. That's important to remember, maybe you leave that job in your 30s or 40s or something like that, you might consider leaving the funds in that 457 because then you have the flexibility to access that money early without the penalty.
Ideally. You save it for later. But sometimes life happens. So that's nice to have. There are quite a few other exceptions as well, so be sure to research those on the IRS website or with your tax professional, and you might get some good ideas, of course, Captain Obvious would say, Wait until age 59 and a half, and that might be possible if you're already in your late 50s, maybe you just have a couple of years to go. Maybe there are some alternative sources of the funds to pick from, and if you can just make it a couple of years, you have saved that 10%, which can really make a nice difference. Next, we have qualified charitable distributions or QCDs, so if you are charitably minded, you can give money directly to a tax qualified charity from your IRA, and note that this is from an IRA, not a 401k, so when this is done properly that donation is not included in your income, even though you pull the money out of a pre tax retirement account, so if you're going to donate money anyway, it's really worth investigating this option, and that's because you'll reduce your tax burden and by skipping the tax payment, that leaves more money for your favorite charity in other words, you don't have to take a distribution, pay the taxes on it and then give the remainder to charity, you can cut out the middle step and just send all of the money directly to a charity, be sure to review this strategy very carefully with your tax expert, because there are some rules and restrictions to be aware of certain age limits and maximum amounts, but if you can meet all of those, it's a great strategy, be sure to check out my other videos on taxes and retirement accounts.
And if you found this helpful, please leave a quick thumbs up. Thank you and take care..
Read MoreHow to Avoid Tax on Retirement Withdrawals
Jason 0 Comments Retire Wealthy Retirement Planning Tips for Retiree's
When you use money from pre tax retirement accounts, you generally owe income tax, but there are several ways to potentially avoid or at least reduce those taxes, so that's what we'll talk about in the next couple of minutes here, but first, it's important to acknowledge that there might not be a perfect solution for you as things get more intricate or you start to pursue these sort of too good to be true strategies, you may be setting yourself up for trouble, so do what you can to manage your taxes, but at some point, it may just be a nice problem to have, one potential solution is if you have an income that's low enough for the year, you might not owe any taxes, that might happen if you only work for part of the year, for example, maybe you are retiring or going to school or something happens like that.
For example, you've got as a single person, let's say 13000 or so, have standard deduction if your income is low enough, and let's say you take out 8000 from a pre tax account, that would all be included in your income, 5000 of earnings from work plus 8000 here gets you up to 13000, but your taxable income would be zero, you will notice though that there's an other tax here of 800, that's because this person is under the age of 59 and half, so they still owe that 10% penalty tax for early distributions. However, if they can qualify for an exception or if you're over the age of 59.5, that would not apply and your total tax might be zero, you can even get strategic about this, so if you know that you're going to have a low income here next year, you might wait to take a distribution, maybe it's November or December when you realize you want some money, and if you can wait until January of the next year, that's great.
Or maybe you split distributions and take some of what you need in December and take the rest in January, and that might help you stay in low tax brackets, or even a 0% tax bracket, Roth distributions are another potential way to get money out tax free, so you already paid income tax on your contributions, those should come out tax free, but you need to be mindful of any earnings in your Roth accounts. It's important to distinguish between Roth IRAS and Roth 401K. So when pulling money out of a Roth IRA, the ordering rules say that you can take out your regular contributions first before you get into any earnings, but that's not the case with Roth 401k. Those Roth distributions come out pro rata, meaning you'll have to include some earnings in every distribution, assuming you have any earnings, and you don't get to pull out the most tax favored dollars first, whenever you're talking about Roth distributions, you want to find out if you're making a qualified distribution and a qualified distribution generally requires that you've had the account open for five years or more, and you're over age 59.5, now, death and disability also qualify.
And if you're moving money over to an IRA, things can look different as well, but this is the type of research you want to do, find out if you can make a qualified distribution, of course, the option for using Roth might not matter if you've spent your whole life putting in pre tax money, and of course, you did have to pay taxes when you make those contributions, so again, nothing is perfect here, like I said, you've either paid it sooner or later, but these are ways to potentially manage your taxes today. Next on the list of not perfect solutions is a 401K loan, so when you borrow from your 401K, you don't owe taxes on that withdrawal as long as you repay the loan on time, but if you don't repay, any unpaid amount may be treated as a distribution and that's subject to taxes and maybe early withdrawal penalties, plus with loans, you really need to be careful about leaving your job or losing your job, so you might be required to repay the outstanding loan balance when you stop working for your employer, but you might not have those funds available to just pay off a loan in a lump sum, that's probably why you borrowed in the first place, in some cases, it is possible to offset the loan amount by contributing the money to an IRA later, but those rules can be complicated, and again, you just need a lump sum of money to pay off the loan, if you're going to do that…
What about that Mandatory tax withholding? When you take a cash distribution from a 401k, the plan typically has to withhold 20% of the gross amount and send that over to the IRS, and that's an advance payment or a deposit on your eventual tax bill for the year, it's not necessarily the exact amount you owe… It's just a deposit. You might owe more, you might owe less… That's problematic if you need the full amount that's in your 401k, if you can't afford to do without that 20%, so as a potential solution, you could move all of that money out of the 401K over to an IRA, an individual retirement account that you control and then from there, you can take distributions using whatever tax withholding level you want, it might be 20%, 10% or zero, again, remember that you may owe taxes on that later, and not withholding enough could end up in there being a big tax bill later in the year and possibly some under payment penalties, so there are a couple of pitfalls with that strategy, and you also need to be able to take a distribution from your 401k that might not be possible unless you have left your job.
So it's important to look at all these details. By the way, I'm Justin Pritchard, and I help people plan for retirement and invest for the future, and I'm going to put some resources in the description below, more on this topic about these taxes on 401 withdrawals, IRA withdrawals, I think you'll find that helpful, there will also be some general retirement planning information, just big picture stuff that I think will be really helpful, so be sure to check that out, and it's also a good time to remember, this is just a short video, we're not covering everything here, it's just kind of some food for thought, so definitely do some more research, triple check everything and talk to a professional before you make any decisions, so what if your main concern is the penalty tax, you're under age 59 and half, and you're taking a distribution, what are some ways to at least avoid that, even if you have to pay income taxes? One solution might be the so called rule of 55, this can allow you to get money out of a retirement account without paying the early withdrawal tax penalty.
So you have to leave your job at age 55 or later, and if you use the money from that Job's, 401K or 403B, Not a different job, but that job that you left at 55 or later, you can use that money without the early withdrawal penalty. You still typically owe income taxes if it's a taxable distribution, that age can go even lower for public safety workers, there's also the 72t or substantially equal periodic payments, for example, that would allow you to take a series of payments from your pre tax accounts, and you can start those before age 59 1/2, getting the money without the early withdrawal penalty, but the strategy can be kind of rigid and complicated, you have to do it for at least five years, or age 59 and a half, whichever is longer, and if you make any kind of little mistake, which is easy to do, then you could derail the whole strategy and you would retroactively owe taxes.
You have to be very careful with that one, but it might be a solution. There are also 457 plans out there that don't have an early withdrawal penalty, so if you have a governmental 457 B, for example, you should be able to take withdrawals at any age without an early distribution penalty. That's important to remember, maybe you leave that job in your 30s or 40s or something like that, you might consider leaving the funds in that 457 because then you have the flexibility to access that money early without the penalty.
Ideally. You save it for later. But sometimes life happens. So that's nice to have. There are quite a few other exceptions as well, so be sure to research those on the IRS website or with your tax professional, and you might get some good ideas, of course, Captain Obvious would say, Wait until age 59 and a half, and that might be possible if you're already in your late 50s, maybe you just have a couple of years to go. Maybe there are some alternative sources of the funds to pick from, and if you can just make it a couple of years, you have saved that 10%, which can really make a nice difference. Next, we have qualified charitable distributions or QCDs, so if you are charitably minded, you can give money directly to a tax qualified charity from your IRA, and note that this is from an IRA, not a 401k, so when this is done properly that donation is not included in your income, even though you pull the money out of a pre tax retirement account, so if you're going to donate money anyway, it's really worth investigating this option, and that's because you'll reduce your tax burden and by skipping the tax payment, that leaves more money for your favorite charity in other words, you don't have to take a distribution, pay the taxes on it and then give the remainder to charity, you can cut out the middle step and just send all of the money directly to a charity, be sure to review this strategy very carefully with your tax expert, because there are some rules and restrictions to be aware of certain age limits and maximum amounts, but if you can meet all of those, it's a great strategy, be sure to check out my other videos on taxes and retirement accounts.
And if you found this helpful, please leave a quick thumbs up. Thank you and take care..
Read MoreCan 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..
Read MoreCan 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..
Read MoreCan I Retire at 55? Tips for Early Retirement
Jason 0 Comments Retire Wealthy Retirement Planning Tips for Retiree's
If you'' re thinking about retiring at 55, you intend to beware concerning where you obtain your advice and support, which'' s since a lot of retirement guidance is geared toward those who retire quite a bit later, as a matter of fact … Most individuals retire at 62, yet things will be various for you if you'' re going to retire at'55. That'' s what we ' ll talk concerning for the following pair of minutes right here, we'' ll go over where you can get the cash from, and just how that functions with tax obligations as well as health care, then we'' ll appearance at some real numbers and also what it might look like for someone who retires at age 55. We might likewise intend to obtain philosophical simply quickly and ask the question, Why age 55? Yes, it'' s a good round number.And there are some fascinating tax methods that are readily available around that age, however allow ' s state you could retire a little earlier at 54, would certainly you wish to make that take place? Or if you worked a couple of more years … I recognize you ' ll believe this is insane, yet if you'functioned a number of even more years and also you could not influence your finances, but still take a few of those dream holidays as well as hang around with loved ones, would certainly that be worth it to maybe function until 59, for instance? So we want to figure out specifically why you are pursuing a specific goal and after that we can boost the opportunities of success for you, so let ' s begin with wellness insurance coverage, this is a challenging one because you'' re retiring a fair bit earlier than lots of people that could be near that Medicare age, so you have a variety of different options to continue being covered, and also it is an excellent concept to have actual medical insurance coverage simply in case something happens.So a couple of your options include, top, you can continue your present advantages from a job if you have them for as much as 18 months in many instances, and that ' s under COBRA or your state ' s continuation program, that can get quite pricey due to the fact that you ' re mosting likely to pay the full price', if you weren ' t currently doing that, plus possibly a teensy little bit additional for administration, but it is a way to proceed with the program that you currently have, to ensure that can be handy if you are mid stream in certain treatments or if it ' s mosting likely to be hard to get certain benefits that you currently have on a different health and wellness care program, however, that ' s not normally a long-term service due to the fact that we need to obtain you till age 65, which is when the majority of people enroll in Medicare, as well as you must see your prices drop a fair bit at that factor, perhaps depending on what occurs, so one more solution that a great deal of people check out is getting their own insurance coverage, which happens generally via a medical care industry or an exchange, and also that ' s where you just by coverage with an insurance policy company.So you can go straight to the insurance providers, yet it ' s typically a great suggestion to undergo … Begin at healthcare.gov,
and also after that experience the industry or the exchange, which means you can go shopping some strategies as well as potentially, depending upon your revenue, you can possibly obtain some cost decreases that make it a great deal extra inexpensive, I ' ll talk much more regarding that in a second, yet an additional choice is to switch over to a spouse ' s plan, if you occur to be wed which individual has coverage that ' s going to proceed'for whatever reason, that may additionally be a solution for you, when you leave your'job, maybe a certifying occasion that allows you to get on that person ' s program, however allow ' s chat even more concerning conserving cash on healthcare expenditures before age'65, the majority of individuals are going to get a policy based on the aspects that are most vital to them, to make sure that could be the costs or the out of pocket optimum, the deductible, the co pays, specific locations of protection, all that kind of point, you can pick a plan that fits your needs.Now, you could locate that those often tend to be fairly costly, as well as so if your revenue is listed below particular degrees, you may be able to get successfully a reduction in the costs, it may be in the form of a tax obligation debt or an aid, so right here ' s just a preview of just how things can seek you, let ' s claim your income is, allow ' s say 50,000 in retired life, and'you need to look at specifically what income means, yet there is no insurance coverage readily available from a spouse, we ' ve obtained one adult, and also let ' s claim you are … As our video recommend age 55 below, so you may obtain an advantage of roughly 422 a month, suggesting you might invest that much less every month, which ' s mosting likely to make it a great deal easier to pay for'insurance coverage on these plans, if we switch your income down to 25,000 per year, the assistance is also bigger, so as you can see by varying or regulating your revenue, as well as this is something you might have some control over if you retire at 55, you can additionally control your healthcare expenses, we ' ll talk about some conflicting goals here, where you may not wish to definitely lessen your income throughout these years, however this is essential for you to understand if you ' re mosting likely to be paying for your own insurance coverage, as well as if you'' re experiencing sticker label shock when you see the prices …'By the means, I ' m going to have a web link to this and also a bunch of various other sources in the summary listed below, so you can have fun with this same calculator yourself.Now, once you ' re on Medicare, the expense must go down a fair bit, this is a calculator from Integrity where we can'say, let ' s state you are a woman, and we ' re going to claim you ' re eligible for Medicare at this point, so we'' ll bring you'approximately age 65. It is mosting likely to be quite a little bit greater expense,'if you look at it prior to age 65, which ' s due to the fact that you are paying for those personal policies from insurer, allow ' s claim you ' re mosting likely to live until age 93, therefore you may expect to invest approximately 5800 6000 dollars per'year, depending on your wellness as well as your area and also various other aspects, it might be essentially, but this is a price quote of what someone may invest, a solitary female each year in retired life, naturally, that number is going to boost annually with rising cost of living and also deteriorating wellness issues. This is a ball park estimate of what you might be investing in the future, now we get to the inquiry of, do you have the economic resources to retire at 55? Which comes down to the earnings and also the possessions that you ' re mosting likely to draw from to offer the resources you require to buy the important things you'want as well as require, and also one method to look at this is to claim We intend to avoid early withdrawal fines due to the fact that once more, you are retiring at an age that ' s earlier than the regular senior citizen and also a lot of retirement accounts are made for you to take withdrawals at 59.5 or later on, to stay clear of those fines, the good news is, you have a number of options, so with private and joint accounts, simply taxed brokerage firm accounts, you can normally withdraw from those with no charges, however you might have funding gains taxes when you sell something, those taxes might go to a lower price than you would certainly pay if you take big withdrawals from pension, yet you just wish to double and also three-way check that, yet that can be a fluid resource of funds.You. Can also generally take out from Roth accounts pretty conveniently. So those routine payments come out initially, simply put, you can draw out your normal payments at any type of time without taxes as well as no penalties, what that indicates is that ' s the yearly restriction payments you may have been making her by year, so the 7000 per year, as an example. That cash would be easily obtainable, but if you have various other money types like Roth conversions, for example, you ' re going to be really careful and get in touch with your certified public accountant and also discover out what every one of that could look like. There. Are various other methods to access funds that are within pre tax retired life accounts, as well as it might actually make good sense to draw on those somewhat, we ' ll talk a lot more regarding that in a minute, yet these are a few of the tricks you can make use of to stay clear of an early withdrawal charge yet still attract on those assets prior to age 59.5. The very first one is the so called guideline of 55, so this uses if'you work at a work with, allow ' s state a 401K, as well as you quit working at that company at age 55 or later, if you fulfill particular requirements, after that you can withdraw those funds from the 401k so they go straight from the 401k to you.They wear ' t go over to an individual retirement account, you could withdraw those funds without a very early withdrawal fine. A difficulty below is that not every employer allows you to do that, so 401k strategies can establish a lot of their own guidelines, as well as among them could be that they wear
' t allow you just call them up and take cash whenever you desire, they may make you … Withdraw the whole amount, so if that ' s the situation, this isn ' t going to work, so make sure to triple contact your employer and also the plan vendors as well as figure out exactly just how this would certainly function logistically or if it will also function. Next, we have SEPP that stands for significantly equivalent periodic repayments or rule 72. This is a chance to attract funds from, let ' s say your IRA or a certain IRA that you choose, but prior to age 59 and also a half without getting early withdrawal penalties.Now, this is not my preferred selection. I don ' t always suggest this extremely typically in all, as well as the reason is because it ' s simple to slide up and also end up paying tax obligation charges. The factor for that remains in part that it ' s truly rigid, so when you establish this, You compute a quantity that you have to take out yearly, and also it has to be the'very same quantity every year, as well as you have to make certain you do that for the longer of when you turn age 59 1/2 or for five years. And also also that seems type of simple, yet it ' s still simple to trip'up, and you likewise have to stay clear of making any type of modifications to your accounts, so it ' s simply truly rigid as well as can be hard to stay with you, so … Not my favorite option, but maybe a choice. Those of you who work for governmental bodies, maybe a city company or something like that, you could have a 457b strategy, as well as those strategies do not have early withdrawal penalties prior to 59 as well as a half, so you can withdraw cash from that as well as utilize some income, pre pay some taxes, and also have some money to spend relatively conveniently, this incidentally, is an argument for leaving cash in your employer ' s 457 versus rolling it over to an IRA, because once it visits an IRA, you undergo those 59 1/2 policies and a possible early withdrawal penalty.So that could end up leaving you with 72 to deal with, as an example, which once more is not optimal. You might be asking, well shouldn ' t I just reduce'tax obligations and also hold off on paying taxes for as long as possible? As well as the response is not necessarily. It can make sense to go ahead and also pre pay some taxes by obtaining calculated, the reason for that is that you will at some point have to pay tax obligations on your pre tax cash as well as it could occur in a huge lump, as well as that can bump you up right into the highest tax obligation brackets, so it can be far better to smooth out the price at which you attract from those accounts as well as with any luck keep yourself in reduced tax obligation brace, at least reasonably speaking.So when your RMDs or your required minimum distributions kick in after age 72 under present regulation, that could potentially bump you up into the highest tax obligation brackets, possibly you want to smooth points out as well as take some income early. So let ' s take a look at the inquiry of, Do you have enough with some specific numbers, and prior to we eye those numbers, just wish to mention that I am Justin Pritchard. I help individuals prepare for retirement and also spend for the future. I ' ve got some great resources, I think, in the description below, several of the important things that we ' ve been chatting regarding right here today, as well as some general retired life intending information. If this is on your mind, I believe a great deal of that is going to be really useful for you. Please have a look at that and also allow me recognize what you assume of what you discover. It ' s also a great time for a pleasant pointer, This is simply a brief video clip, I can ' t possibly cover whatever. Please three-way and quadruple check'with some experts like a Certified public accountant or a financial consultant before you make any type of decisions, so allow ' s get back right into these questions, Do you have enough? As we constantly need to discuss, it depends upon where you are as well as exactly how much you invest as well as how things benefit you.Are you fortunate to retire into a good market, or are you unfortunate and also retiring into a negative market? All of these different facets are mosting likely to affect your success, but allow ' s jump over to my monetary preparation tool and also take a look at an instance. This is just a theoretical example, it ' s the world ' s most over streamlined example, so please keep that in mind, with a genuine individual, we ' ve got a lot much more taking place. The world is a complex place and
points get messier, however we ' re keeping it very easy below, just to chat about an instance of how things might look, so he or she has one million in pre tax possessions as well as 350,000 in a brokerage firm account, as well as if we just swiftly look at their dashboard right here, quite high likelihood of success, so allow ' s make it'a little bit'extra interesting and state … Maybe that individual retirement account has, let ' s state, 700,000 in it. What is that going to do? As well as incidentally, this is still a great deal greater than a great deal of individuals have, but once more, if you ' re going to be retiring at 55, you usually have rather low expenses and/or a great deal of assets.So let ' s remember here that retirees wear ' t always invest at a flat inflation changed level, and I ' ll get right into the assumptions below in a second, yet let ' s just take a look at if this individual spends at rising cost of living minus 1 %using the retired life costs “smile,” that significantly improves their opportunities, and I ' ve obtained video clips on why you may consider that as a potential reality, so you'can check into that later on at your leisure, yet as for the presumptions, we presume they spend about 50,000 a year, retire'at age 55. The returns are 5.5 %per year, and also inflation is 3%per year. Wouldn ' t that be freshening if we got 3%… So we eye their earnings below age 55, absolutely nothing', and afterwards Social Safety and security starts at 70. They ' re doing a Social Safety and security bridge method. I ' ve got video clips on that particular as well, or at the very least one video, the complete year starts here later, and also after that their Social Protection change for rising cost of living, considering their taxes, we have absolutely no taxes in these earlier years since they are just not pulling from those pre tax obligation accounts. Maybe not getting much, if anything, in regards to capital gains,'perhaps their reduction is wiping that out, so we might have a possibility right here to in fact do something and also once again, pre pay some tax obligations and pull some taxed revenue'forward.In reality, if we eye their federal income tax bracket, you can see that it ' s fairly reduced from 55 on, possibly they desire to draw some of this earnings ahead to ensure that later on in life, they are drawing whatever out of the pre tax obligation accounts simultaneously. It just depends on what ' s essential to you and what you intend to attempt to do, and that brings us to some tips for doing calculations, whether you are doing this with somebody, an economic coordinator or on your own, you intend to consider that space in between when you quit working as well as when your earnings advantages start from, allow ' s say, Social Protection, there ' s also that space between when you stop functioning and also when Medicare starts, and also that ' s an additional essential thing to check out, yet what are your approaches available there? Should you take some income, and precisely how much? That ' s going to be a location where you might have some control, so it ' s worth doing some excellent planning.We also desire to look very closely at the inflation and also investment returns, and also what are the assumptions in any kind of software application that you ' re making use of? These are truly important inputs and also they can considerably transform what takes place …'You saw what happened when we switched over from a level rising cost of living modified boost annually to the retirement costs smile, simply a refined little adjustment has a big distinction on how points unfold, as well as in that circumstance, by the means, we would normally have healthcare boosting at'a much faster rate.But like I said, we use an over streamlined example and didn ' t necessarily consist of that in
this case, yet you do intend to click via or ask concerns on what exactly are the presumptions and also are you on board with those assumptions?'You might additionally need to make some changes, and also this is just the fact of retiring at an early age when you may have 30 plus years of retired life left, a lot can happen, and there really is a whole lot of benefit to making small changes, particularly during market collisions, for example, so. If things are not necessarily going terrific, some little tweaks might possibly enhance the possibilities of success considerably, that might imply something as easy as avoiding a rising cost of living modification for a year or 2, or maybe dialing back some holiday spending.These are things you put on ' t intend to do, that ' s for certain, however with those little changes, you can potentially keep things on the right track, and that method you put on ' t need to go back to function or make bigger sacrifices. And also so I wish you located that valuable. If you did, please leave a fast thumbs up, thanks as well as take treatment.
Yes, it'' s a great round number.And there are some intriguing tax obligation approaches that are available around that age, however allow ' s state you could retire a little bit previously at 54, would certainly you want to make that occur? A problem below is that not every company allows you to do that, so 401k strategies can set a lot of their own policies, and one of them might be that they wear
' t allow you just call them up and take cash whenever you want, they could make you … Withdraw the whole quantity, so if that ' s the case, this isn ' t going to function, so be sure to three-way check with your employer and the plan suppliers and locate out precisely just how this would certainly work logistically or if it will certainly also function. It simply depends on what ' s important to you and also what you desire to attempt to do, as well as that brings us to some ideas for doing estimations, whether you are doing this with somebody, an economic planner or on your own, you want to look at that space between when you stop working as well as when your revenue benefits start from, let ' s claim, Social Protection, there ' s also that void between when you quit functioning as well as when Medicare starts, and that ' s one more essential point to look at, but what are your techniques readily available there? That ' s going to be an area where you might have some control, so it ' s worth doing some excellent planning.We additionally desire to look very closely at the inflation and also financial investment returns, and what are the assumptions in any software that you ' re using? If points are not necessarily going great, some little tweaks might potentially enhance the opportunities of success significantly, that might mean something as straightforward as skipping an inflation adjustment for a year or two, or possibly calling back some trip spending.These are points you wear ' t want to do, that ' s for certain, yet with those little changes, you can potentially keep points on track, as well as that way you put on ' t have to go back to work or make larger sacrifices.
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