When you realize that retirement is around the corner, you may have mixed feelings about it. You might be excited to pursue hobbies and interests or travel, but you may be worried about how your finances will fare once you're no longer bringing in a full-time income. Before you clock in your last day, it's smart to start using the financial tips below to ensure that your retirement will be a happy one.
Determine How Much Money You'll Need
You may know what bills you're responsible for at this moment in your life, but realize that your financial needs may change in the future. It's important that you sit down and determine what your financial needs will be like once you stop working. It's important to plan for even the worst scenarios. For example, if you already have a chronic disease such as COPD, you need to think about how that could impact your finances over time. You might not need a CPAP mask right now, for instance, but if your condition worsens, what could the costs be like? You also need to think about how inflation and other factors might affect the cost of food, fuel, and other necessities. A financial planner can help you to come up with some concrete numbers that you should think about.
Consider Cutting Back
Once you have a clear idea of what future responsibilities might be, you may become concerned. To reduce your financial burden and free up some money for you to spend, you may consider downsizing or cutting back in whatever ways you can. For some people, it could mean selling the three-bedroom home where they raised a family and purchasing a smaller one-bedroom house. For others, it may be to stop eating out so often during the week. By cutting back now, you might enter retirement with more money than you would have otherwise.
Set a Retirement-Ready Budget
Setting a retirement-ready budget can help you become comfortable with what your life will be like after retirement. If you feel that the budget is too strict or unsustainable, you can work on changing your investment portfolio or making other adjustments so that when retirement does arrive, you'll have more money to work with.
With these tips, retirement can be met with enthusiasm and anticipation. Meeting with a financial planner from a group like Fogel Capital Management, Inc. can enable you to feel confident about your retirement and life after work.
Share7 June 2017
After we bought a house, I started realizing that we were going to need to learn to save a little money. We had become pretty laid back about spending because we were so accustomed to making so much extra each month, but with a mortgage, we found ourselves running out of money on a regular basis. I decided to get real about our finances, which is why I set up a financial plan to stick with year round. You wouldn't believe how much of a difference that simple plan made. We went from scraping together money to head to the grocery store to sticking with a rock solid budget.
