Month: January 2023

7 Core Elements of Retirement Planning

Harvey 0 Comments January 25, 2023 Planning your Retirement

Everyone bill Lessman here for money evolution calm in today's video I'm gonna be talking about what I call the seven core elements of retirement planning so if you're somebody that wants to get more serious about the planning that you're doing for retirement then I think you're really going to enjoy this video now if you've watched any of my other videos maybe on my blog or my youtube channel or Facebook page then you probably have already heard me talk a little bit about some of these seven core elements individually what I plan to do in this video is really bring them all together really show how each of these seven core elements are all interrelated and hopefully at the end of this video you're going to have some information to help you make some more well-informed decisions about your own retirement but real quick before I get into the presentation I wanted to draw your attention to a free guide that I put together it's the seven core elements of retirement planning guide and in this I have all of the information or a lot of the information that I'm going to cover here in today's video plus there's some great worksheets that you can complete on your own to really help you get a good start towards putting together some of this planning for yourself so to get access to that guide I'm going to put a link right below this video if you click on that link it'll take you to a page just put your email address in there and we'll go ahead and send you out that guide I'll wait here and I'll see everyone back here as we get into presentation okay so welcome back so if you're starting to do some planning for your retirement whether retirements may be coming up in the next year or two or even if retirements still a few years off into the future you probably realize already that there's a lot of different aspects of your retirement and that's what we're gonna be talking about here so let's take a look at these seven core elements so number one on the list is we need to understand how much your retirement could cost and what we call identify your gap the second thing on the list is we need to know where to save money obviously there's lots of choices there's Roth IRAs there's 401k plans traditional accounts so we need to know where to save the money based on your own personal situation and your own individual tax situation we also need to talk about Social Security obviously that's going to be a big component for many of you watching this video is when to collect Social Security how to coordinate your Social Security benefits with your spouse if you're married so that's very important health care that actually may be what I think is one of the most underestimated or overlooked retirement expenses that's out there and there's a lot of information that you need to understand about health care so we're gonna talk about that a little bit here we also need to look at 401k plans so you might have a 401k you might have a 403b plan at work or some other employer sponsored retirement plans we need to know how to best take advantage of that 401k plan there's a lot of features that a lot of people may not fully be aware of that could be inside your 401k plan so how to take advantage of that is certainly very important we need to create a plan for income so if you've been investing for your lifetime and while you're working you were in what we call the retirement accumulation phase once you go into retirement we need to think differently we need to look at how to plan for withdrawals on your portfolio we need to look at things much much differently for that and then finally the last item on the list is investments choosing the investments that are gonna fit within your individual retirement plans and to help you achieve what your retirement goals are unfortunately this item here that we list as number seven on the list is oftentimes the one that people look at first in fact if you turn on the business channel you look at CNBC or you open up the Wall Street Journal or read pretty much any financial publication if you flip through the pages a lot of the discussion a lot of the advertisements are all pushing you towards certain investments they're talking about returns and the performance of this fund versus that fund they're talk about mutual funds they're talking about annuities exchange-traded funds they may be talking about costs you know in looking at low-cost options and they would have you believe that really this is the most important thing that you need to be thinking about regarding your retirement and certainly the investments are absolutely very very important but we want to look at these investments after we've already addressed these other seven core elements and if we start here with investments a lot of times we can kind of get distracted we can get thrown off course a little bit because we really haven't put into thought here how those investments are gonna fit within your your own individual retirement plan but once we've addressed those seven core elements and we start choosing investments now we have a clear vision for what we need those investments to do and what we want them to do to create your plan for income and to create the retirement lifestyle that you want so we're gonna get into each one of these here in a little bit more detail and I'm gonna again start to show you how each one of these seven core elements are gonna be interrelated with one another okay so let's start right here in the middle what we want to do here with this very first core element is we want to try to understand how much your retirement is going to cost or could cost and we also want to identify how much of a gap you have between where you want to be for those retirement goals versus where you are today and what I like to refer to here what I like to think about is begin with the end in mind so here's your retirement and what I want you to do is start thinking about what it is that you think your retirement is going to look like for example what will your housing situation be do you plan to stay in your current house do you plan to downsize homes do you plan to spend winter someplace warm you also want to think about the things that you want to do in retirement so you can have a lot of free time you're not gonna have to go to work anymore so think about the hobbies that you plan to do you plan to play golf every day or do you like to travel and start thinking about how much some of those expenses are going to be and you also want to look and see okay so basically what is your current situation how much are you saving for your retirement how much money do you already have saved for retirement and what we want to look at here and I think this is very important that a lot of people may tend to overlook essentially is that we have a trade-off basically we have our lifestyle that we have today versus that lifestyle that we want to have in retirement and if we think about this for a second here if we spend all of our money today we don't save anything for retirement we're gonna have a great lifestyle here today but that retirements not going to look very good contrary to that we could be saving a whole bunch of money for retirement putting away all kinds of money but that may be sacrificing that lifestyle that we have here today so I want you to think about that a little bit in terms of what are you trading off and I think there's a lot of people because they haven't maybe done some of these calculations they could be in a position where they're saving almost too much money for the retirement they're really sacrificing and giving up a lot of things today and there's a couple of different categories of this there's there's things that of course we have our money that we're saving so if we save more money today that's less money that we can have for the future for that retirement but we also have time as well and so what I mean by that is we may be working ourselves putting all kinds of stress on our on our health on our situation by maybe working a whole bunch we're saving a lot of money for retirement but we're really sacrificing that quality of life here today and so be thinking about all of these different aspects not just the financial aspect of how much you're saving but think about that think about like I said your health – and are you taking care of your yourself from a health standpoint as well because by the time we get to this retirement we want to have healthy bodies we want to be able to go out and do those things be able to play golf in and live that retirement lifestyle so again this is at the very center of these seven core elements and everything else is going to be interrelated to what this retirement gap is actually going to be and and how that's going to affect that future retirement lifestyle okay so now that you've hopefully uncovered what this retirement gap is and you've really kind of gotten an idea of what your retirement cash flow is going to be and cash flow is something that we refer to a lot here on some of the videos that we do but really it is the lifeblood of not only your retirement situation but also your current financial situation it's basically money coming in versus money going out and almost everything else on this list here is going to in some way or another affect cash flow the other thing that I want to talk about here before I start getting into each one of these seven core elements and a little bit more detail are taxes now when I created the seven more elements I thought a lot about how to include taxes should that be its own separate element and what I ultimately decided was that taxes are certainly very important and it's a big part of what we do here in terms of some of our planning but what we're going to talk about is we started looking at these seven core elements as we're gonna look at how taxes are going to influence a lot of these different categories here okay so let's start right off the bat and let's talk about where to save money and obviously we have lots of choices we have Roth accounts like Roth IRAs you even have Roth's 401k plans now and you have traditional accounts and and for retirement savings those are probably two of the most primary areas and basically that's a big decision for a lot of us and what we really need to uncover is what is our tax situation likely going to be in the future versus what is that tax situation going to be today and again it goes right back here to this cash flow and understanding what those gaps are and what does our current situation today versus what is that situation going to be in the future so the Roth is going to be favorable if we think we're going to be in a higher tax bracket in retirement than we are today and the traditional account is going to be more favorable if we think we're going to be in a lower tax bracket in the future so we want to look at that the other thing we want to take a look at and I've actually got a entire video on our YouTube channel where I talk about this is investments for retirement in non retirement accounts and I go into a whole huge explanation as to why I think that is really just wasting a lot of money when it comes to to taxes there so again uncovering what those gaps are is going to help us to figure out where should we be saving money what's going to be the most optimal for that future cash flow situation and for our current tax situation let's look over here to Social Security again that's going to be a very big component we could take Social Security benefits as early as age 62 or we could delay Social Security benefits to as late as age 70 and basically there's a lot of decisions to make there again it's going to come back to understanding that cash flow so there's a lot of be out there talking about how to maximize social security benefits there's even some calculators that you might be able to find out on the web what often times is missing from some of those calculators is how that decision as to when to collect Social Security is going to impact that cash flow situation and contrary how that's going to affect your tax situation as well so we need to look at that and there's also gonna be a coordination of benefits that you need to take into consideration if you're married and you have a spouse because you might decide that one of you collects Social Security benefits early to get a little bit of cash flow coming in but maybe the other spouse is going to wait and delay those Social Security benefits whether or not you're going to be working in retirement is also going to impact that and impact the potential taxes that you're going to have on Social Security health care I talked about this here a few moments ago where health care I think is one of the most underestimated expenses in fact according to a recent survey or study by fidelity investments they determined that an average couple retiring this year that 65 years old could expect to spend two hundred and forty five thousand dollars on health care related costs over their retirement lifetime so that is a huge number a quarter of a million dollars just to cover and fund our health care and that does not include by the way any potential nursing home expenses or long-term care expenses so that's a big deal we also need to consider health care for any of you that may be planning to retire before Medicare that starts at age 65 so you need to look at how your maybe employer benefits if you have any that are going to continue into retirement how that's going to come into play or if you have to go out into the exchanges and go out into the Affordable Care Act in fact actually according to the Kaiser Family Foundation they put together some great research on this health care stuff but they actually said that a 64 year old couple could expect to spend about seventeen thousand dollars a year on their health care premiums for a policy that kicks in before Medicare starts and that still leaves them with about a sixty six hundred dollar out-of-pocket expense that they could have in addition to that $17,000 so that is by no means a top-of-the-line gold playing effect that's actually a silver plan kind of in the middle there but you can see if you want to retire prior to age 65 that that can start to get pretty expensive the other thing here too again taxes are going to also influence your health care as well because your Medicare premiums are going to be largely dependent on what your taxable income what that adjustable gross income is for the year so the higher that is the more likely you are to be paying on your Medicare premium so again understanding that cash flow and understanding what that future cash flow is going to help you hopefully make some better decisions regarding healthcare as well your 401k plan is going to be another one of these seven core elements that you're going to want to optimize unfortunately in my opinion I think a lot of 401k plans have really kind of watered down some of their investment options here over the last several years but there's a couple of things that you can still do to hopefully optimize or maximize some of the benefits that you have on your 401k plan so one of those things is you can go all the way up to eighteen thousand dollars a year in contributions if you're under 50 years old and if you're 50 years old or older that number can be as high as twenty four thousand dollars a year and most people probably just understand that these are the limitations of the 401k plan but some 401k plans in fact more and more are offering this feature you may have access to an after-tax savings account within your company sponsored retirement plans and that could allow you to go all the way up to as much as fifty four thousand dollars a year in total retirement account contributions and that's going to be a combination of your contributions plus any employer match that you might be getting can be as high as fifty four thousand dollars so that can allow you to extend even further some of the contributions that you're making inside the 401k the other thing that a lot of 401k plans are offering now is something called a self-directed account and that is an option that you could have inside your 401k plan that could give you access to literally thousands of additional investment options that are not of the main 401k menu so again not every 401k plan is gonna have these features but you want to definitely look into it and see if that's something now your self-directed account that may not be for everybody either because there's going to be a little bit more research and a little bit more due diligence that you're going to have to do on choosing investments but it could be a great option for somebody to get some additional resources in that 401k plan and then the last thing what will the second the last thing we want to talk about here are planning for income and again we talked about this a little bit earlier that you're in a much different stage of life once you start going into retirement and you're gonna start withdrawing or taking money out of some of these investment accounts and something we call the sequence of return starts to become a very important factor so if you think about it like this you know the market obviously is going to go up and down over time and when you are in the retirement accumulation stage of your investing as the market was maybe going through these these these motions as the market was maybe going down you were continuously hopefully making new investments into those accounts as the market was dropping and but the opposite happens though when you go into retirement if we go through a downturn and you're withdrawing money out of those portfolios that's going to have a very negative effect or can potentially have a very negative effect so we definitely need to take that into account but what we need to do before we do that is we need to understand what this cash flow is and understand where those gaps are so once we understand where those holes are in your financial plan and we know that in certain years you need to take a certain amount of money out of your retirement accounts then we can plan for that accordingly and sometimes what we do is we use what we call a bucket strategy and we just usually divide the portfolio into three buckets and we want to have some cash reserves maybe one to two years worth of cash needs in a very liquid very safe bucket so that when you do need to take money out you're not having to withdraw money from volatile investments that could be invested in the stock market you also may want to have kind of this mid-range thing maybe three to four years or three to five years worth of money that's in a my liquid bucket that's still going to be on the more conservative side and maybe some of those investments are going to pay some dividends or some interest to help you refill that that first bucket and then finally over here is your long-term bucket and that's gonna be investments that are gonna hopefully keep up with inflation provide you with some growth that hopefully if you're in retirement for what could be 20 years or maybe 30 years in length that you've got some growth vehicles there but we want to think and break down this down so that you have a plan for income and keep in mind that if you don't have a plan for income the government has one for you it's called the required minimum distribution rules and so you may know that after you turn 70 and a half you need to start taking mandatory distributions every year from your IRA accounts in your 401k plans as part of this RMD so having your own plan is usually going to be better than reverting back to the government's plan and then finally we talked about this earlier the last thing that we want to look at is the investments that we select and again once we've answered all of these other issues we've looked at the six other core elements then actually choosing the investments becomes pretty easy because now we know what investments are gonna fit into our buckets as an example which investments are going to be able to provide that income or those distribution needs which ones are going to be appropriate for your tax situation that are gonna you know help you you know plan for your Social Security your health care and all of that and then we can start looking at different investments that are going to fit into that retirement plan okay so there you have it those are the seven core elements of retirement planning and hopefully you've gotten some great information here out of watching the video here today and hopefully you've gotten a pretty good idea of how these seven core elements are all interrelated to each other and how making a decision about one item such as social security or healthcare or choosing investments why that doesn't necessarily live in a vacuum and how maybe tweaking something over here might have an influence on something over there and so really bringing everything back to cash flow is really very critical so you understand how you know making a change in one category of your retirement planning you know might impact something else so again hopefully you've already downloaded the guide take your time look through some of the information in there we try to be very thorough with some of that we've got again some great worksheets that are gonna help you really get a good start on putting together some of these retirement plans and certainly think about what you want that retirement to look like also – for some of you you may want a little bit more help and of course we do that we offer a comprehensive cash flow based financial plan that can take a look at this and we will address not only your cash flow today but what that cash flow is likely to be in the future based on what you're currently doing and we can also start to look at each one of these seven core elements and look at how each one of those is going to help you achieve those retirement goals and even if retirement still a little bit more often in the future if you've been saving money or maybe you've been putting off some of the planning that you've been doing again this is something that can help put you on a good track towards making you better well informed about getting retirement planning done

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