A: Of course, you can! You have the best information about what you want to do in retirement. You have all the current income and expense data and know your abilities.
You may need retirement planning tools, retirement information, and the best techniques for creating a baseline plan. I know you haven’t had the urgency to create a plan and follow it, so you are reading this now.
A: I want to help you with important information, tools, and methods, as well as the path to create your written plan. This may be enough for some, but I believe you will want to have it enhanced professionally by a Certified Financial Planner (which I am not and don’t want to be). Doing that will likely increase the amount of money that you will have during retirement.
Secondly, you will feel more trust in that expanded plan. Another benefit is that you will save the CFP several hours of information gathering at their hourly rate, saving you money. The information you gather and organize for these courses is mostly the same as for a CFP, giving you a head start.
A: I am bored. I have too few activities that I can afford to do and too much time doing nothing. I hate daytime TV, and I’ve seen all the movies.
Solution: In the courses, I tackle this problem directly. I want you to select what makes you happy and what you can do to make others happy (without sacrificing your happiness). Bored people are not doing what they want to do. They are doing nothing except wasting their time with relatively worthless activities. Taking care of yourself physically is worthwhile, but having a sense of fulfillment is essential to wanting to live longer.
A: Your financial status has three factors: income, expenses, and current savings. Ideally, your income is enough to cover your expenses, so you don’t need to dip into savings. At any point, the net difference of income and expenses either adds to or subtracts from savings.
When you retire, your income gets reduced, usually to less than your expenses. They get reduced, too, but usually not enough to live comfortably with Social Security and pensions, so you need additional income streams.
A: President Dwight Eisenhower said, “Plans are worthless, but planning is everything.” Any plan requires updating as events happen and circumstances change. For a retirement plan, you want to look at it at least yearly and perhaps more or less often, depending on what is happening around you.
A: Traditional financial planning looks to save a big pile of money, which you can divvy out for the 25 years (more or less) you will be retired. There’s a lot more to this, and the scenarios are endless. This approach uses investment vehicles such as stocks and bonds to grow your savings. That works well if you started at age 25 (or earlier) and have no financial setbacks. Starting later reduces the boost you will get from compound interest, but you still can have a comfortable retirement with a non-traditional plan.
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