These five steps will help you toward a safe, secure, and fun retirement

Capitalstars Investment Advisor

Retirement planning is a multistep process that evolves over time. To have a comfortable, secure — and fun — retirement, you need to build the financial cushion that will fund it all. The fun part is why it makes sense to pay attention to the serious and perhaps boring part: planning how you’ll get there.
Planning for retirement starts with thinking about your retirement goals and how long you have to meet them. Then you need to look at the types of retirement accounts that can help you raise the money to fund your future. As you save that money, you have to invest it to enable it to grow. The surprise last part is taxes: If you’ve got tax deductions over the years for the money you’ve contributed to your retirement accounts, a significant tax bill awaits when you start withdrawing those savings. There are ways to minimize the retirement tax hit while you save for the future — and to continue the process when that day arrives and you actually do retire.

We’ll get into all of these issues in this Retirement Planning Guide. But first, start by learning the five steps everyone should take, no matter what their age, to build a solid retirement plan.


1. Understand Your Time Horizon

Your current age and expected retirement age create the initial groundwork of an effective retirement strategy. The longer the time between today and retirement, the higher the level of risk your portfolio can withstand. If you’re young and have 30-plus years until retirement, you should have the majority of your assets in riskier investments, such as stocks. Though there will be volatility, over long time periods stocks have historically outperformed other securities, such as bonds. The key word here is “long,” meaning more than 10 years at least.


2. Determine Retirement Spending Needs

Having realistic expectations about post-retirement spending habits will help you define the required size of a retirement portfolio. Most people believe that after retirement their annual spending will amount to only 70% to 80% of what they spent previously. Such an assumption is often proved to be unrealistic, especially if the mortgage has not been paid off or if unforeseen medical expenses occur. Retirees also sometimes spend their first years splurging on travel or other bucket-list goals.


3. Calculate After-Tax Rate of Investment Returns

Once the expected time horizons and spending requirements are determined, the after-tax real rate of return must be calculated to assess the feasibility of the portfolio producing the needed income. A required rate of return in excess of 10% (before taxes) is normally an unrealistic expectation, even for long-term investing. As you age, this return threshold goes down, as low-risk retirement portfolios are largely composed of low-yielding fixed-income securities.


4. Assess Risk Tolerance vs. Investment Goals

Whether it’s you or a professional money manager who is in charge of the investment decisions, a proper portfolio allocation that balances the concerns of risk aversion and return objectives is arguably the most important step in retirement planning. How much risk are you willing to take to meet your objectives? Should some income be set aside in risk-free Treasury bonds for required expenditures?


5. Stay on Top of Estate Planning

Estate planning is another key step in a well-rounded retirement plan, and each aspect requires the expertise of different professionals, such as lawyers and accountants, in that specific field. Life insurance is also an important part of an estate plan and the retirement-planning process. Having both a proper estate plan and life insurance coverage ensures that your assets are distributed in a manner of your choosing and that your loved ones will not experience financial hardship following your death. A carefully outlined plan also aids in avoiding an expensive and often lengthy probate process.


The Bottom Line

The burden of retirement planning is falling on individuals now more than ever. Few employees can count on an employer-provided defined-benefit pension, especially in the private sector. The switch to defined-contribution plans, such as 401(k)s, also means that managing the investments becomes your responsibility, not your employer’s.