Retirement

Good financial planning involves taking a comprehensive and holistic approach to looking at your financial picture. It isn’t just investment management, but also tax planning, retirement income planning, estate planning, and protection of assets. It also means trying to maximize saving money through tax reduction strategies and expense management.

One of the more frequent questions we get when meeting with clients or potential clients is:“Should we keep our life insurance after we retire?” Unfortunately, there isn’t one right or wrong answer to this question.

 Most people have a vision of retirement as their “Golden Years”, where they are free from the stress of work and can finally do all the bucket list items they have dreamed of. Of course, retirement can be golden, but it can also be a painful experience.

Retirement is not an end. It’s an experiment in Activity, Relationships, and Time (ART). And like all experiments, the ART of retirement involves some trial and error. It’s not easy leaving behind the routine, the people, and the places that were such a big part of your life while you were working.

Thirty years ago, this month, the stock market experienced the largest one day drop ever – 508 points or 22.6% for the Dow Jones Industrial Index. Market declines all around the world were even larger, with the Hong Kong exchange dropping 45% in a single day.

In our blog series that we published last year - “Health Care Costs – The Storm Cloud Hanging Over Your Retirement”, we discussed the Fidelity health care cost study that the investment company conducts each year. Well, they just released the results of their study for 2017 and those costs have increased another 5.5% from 2016.

One of the more important and misunderstood benefits available through Social Security is the spousal retirement benefit. The original purpose of the spousal benefit was to provide a retirement income for stay at home spouses who had limited work history because they did not work or spent several years out of the workforce while raising a family.

One of the most important decisions a person nearing retirement needs to make is when to take Social Security. Most people are aware that you can start your benefits as early as age 62 and this often becomes a trigger point for deciding when to retire.

Your Social Security benefit will likely be one of your largest and most important sources of income during retirement. What we know about Social Security benefits are that they are:

·       Guaranteed by the federal government