Longevity: The Retirement Problem No One Is Discussing

Common Sense Financial Podcast

Did you know that a good part of American households haven’t thought about retirement planning?

When it comes to planning for retirement, there are some key concepts to understand and three traps you should do your best to avoid.

Listen to learn why a money increase doesn’t always equal a lifestyle enhancement, the three things people often look at but that come back to bite them later on, and how you can effectively plan for retirement and protect your money.

• As life expectancy increases, people will be finding themselves needing to save more money for retirement.
• Brian believes that it’s going to be possible to be retired for as many years as one has worked, because people are living longer than ever before.
• According to a 2019 retirement confidence survey by the Employee Benefit Research Institute, more than half of American households are at risk of running out of money in retirement due to the lack of savings and the unpredictability of the stock market.
• If you look back and think about how much money you were making when you first started working and compare it to today, you should see an increase.
• However, more than a lifestyle enhancement, the increase is just an inflation adjustment. And the crazy thing is that only 42% of Americans have tried to calculate how much money they will need for retirement!
• Brian has noticed that many people go into retirement because of eligibility, without having actually calculated how much money they would need – this is a problem, especially because of three things that are outside of their control: inflation, markets, and taxes.
• To offset inflation, you need to earn more on your money than the inflation rate that is eroding your purchasing power.
• Want to protect yourself from market losses? Then, you either need to not be in the market or work to insulate your portfolio through diversification strategies that are challenging for most people to leverage.
• As far as taxes are concerned, the best way to tackle them would be to focus on building tax-free assets and stop the propensity to kick the “tax can” down the road.
• Even though these may sound like obvious moves, Brian has seen people do the opposite – with things like funding their 401k accounts, parking money in the bank, or pouring it into the stock market.
• Brian warns against tapping into the stock market as a means to draw income because it’s the Government and Wall Street that have control over it, not you.
• There’s a key difference that some people tend to forget when it comes to retirement planning: accumulating money is done one way, drawing income for retirement is done another way.
• Brian stresses the importance of not taking retirement planning lightly.
• Remember: underestimating the amount of money needed to maintain a comfortable lifestyle in retirement, or relying on too many things outside of your control can be a significant financial risk.

Mentioned in this episode:

BrianSkrobonja.com

BrianSkrobonja.com/FamilyOfficeQuiz

Center for Disease Control

Pew Research Center

Employee Benefit Research Institute

Susan Powter

Chat GPT

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