Personal Finance - Chapter 14

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Grand Canyon University *

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May 7, 2024

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THE OVERVIEW TO RETIREMENT PLANNING Kennedy Ihrig December 8th, 2022 FIN 001: Managing Personal Finances
Planning for retirement is important to start earlier than what most people think. Generally, people think you don’t have to start planning until your 40s, but really you should start planning as early as 22 years of age. The topics that will be discussed are the role retirement planning plays in personal financial planning, the pitfalls of retirement planning, estimating your income needs, online retirement planning, and the sources of retirement income. Starting off with the role of retirement that plays into personal financial planning. It is important to make sure that you are able to achieve a comfortable standard of living in your retirement years. Not only does retirement planning affect your future standard of living, but it also affects your current standard of living. If your plan goes according to plan and is successful, it can be very rewarding and can contribute to your net worth and your quality of life. The first step to take is setting retirement goals for yourself. These goals should be what you want to do in retirement, the standard of living you want to achieve, and special goals (i.e. you want to take a cruise). With those goals you’ll want to establish the size of the ‘nest egg’ that you will need to achieve those goals. To do this you’ll need to build an investment program that will allow you to build up the ‘nest egg.’ This includes creating a systematic (and disciplined) savings plan and identifying the types of investments that will meet your retirement needs. We can all wish to have $6 million, but that is far from the reach. However, people tend to make mistakes with sound retirement planning. Individuals tend to make these three mistakes; starting too late, putting away too little, and investing too conservatively. Starting too late will leave you short at retirement age and could possibly delay your retirement age altogether. Correcting the mistake of putting away too little, a good guide to follow is to allocate 15+% of your pre-tax income to retirement savings. With the mistake of investing too conservatively, you don’t want to put too much in low-yield, low-risk fixed-income securities. For example, those 1
would be CDs or Treasury notes. All the three errors are compounded due to the effects of compound interest. However, there is a trade-off among the three factors, for example - if you were to accept a lower rate of return with starting investing early or if you were to invest a higher percentage of after-tax income. Individuals can pick the combination of variables that best suit their needs. Some of the variables being the period of accumulation, annual contribution, and the rate of return. When starting to estimate your income needs, there are two general approaches to estimating the future income needs. Those being; planning for retirement over a series of short-term periods leading into every 3-5 years when the period ends (revise and update your plan) or planning for retirement over one long-term period that goes into several decades of the future. With either one of these approaches, individuals will want to estimate your retirement income as a percentage of what they currently earn. Something that has probably become more common in recent years, just because of technology being more present and always evolving, is online retirement planning. Not only has the internet made retirement planning easier over time, but they provide ‘what if’ scenarios, which are also known as sensitivity analyses, where individuals can change one of the variables at a time and see the quantitative effect. A good example is Quicken.com - they have a user-friendly site that enables a questionnaire. Based on the individual's answers to the questionnaire, the site will identify the size of the income shortfall, the amount of retirement funds that need to be accumulated over time, and the different ways to achieve the desired retirement ‘nest egg.’ Lastly, it’s important to know what the options of retirement income are available to you. There are four main sources of income for retired people - Social Security, earnings from 2
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