How Confident Are You with Your Retirement Plan?
Are you highly confident in the retirement plan you have set up? If you’re like most of the people we run across, you’re probably a low or medium on the confidence scale. Some people don’t even have any plan set up at all!
Here are 4 questions you have to answer positively in order to be able to say that you’re confident with your retirement plan:
1. have you thought about how you’ll practice your hobbies in retirement?
2. do you have a plan to guarantee lifetime income?
3. do you understand how taxes will affect your retirement?
4. do you have an estate plan set up?
Listen in for the answers.
Back Door Roth IRA Conversions
If you make too much money to contribute to a deductible IRA or even a Roth IRA, this episode may be of interest to you as we explain what a back door Roth conversion is and how it works.
Let’s start with the definition:
back door Roth conversion = contributing non-deductible money to a traditional IRA and then converting it into a Roth IRA; when you do this in the same year, as long as you meet certain criteria, that conversion will be tax-free; basically, a back door Roth conversion is a way to contribute money into an IRA when you could not have done so by any other method
Listen in to find out how this can work out practically.
Q&A: Dollar Devaluing, Social Security Spousal Benefit, Inherited IRAs
In this show, we answer 3 questions that seem to come up frequently from listeners in recent weeks:
- the US economy, China and what happens if the dollar becomes worthless
- Social Security and the spousal benefit
- if you inherit an IRA and a Roth IRA, do you have to take distributions
Listen in for the answers.
Are You More Loyal to Your Investments or to Your Family?
The title of this podcast must be a rhetorical question, right?
Well, not necessarily. We recently met with an individual who has been following this podcast, and he has $10M in stock with $5.5M of it in UPS stock. He used to work for UPS, he loves UPS, he never wants to sell the UPS stock.
The question is, if the market tanks, will his beloved UPS stock remain unchanged, or will is lose value like all the other stocks would? Of course it would lose value – and as a consequence, this individual’s nest-egg and perhaps the inheritance he intends to leave to his family would be greatly affected.
Listen in for more thoughts on how to plan your retirement investments while keeping both your family and your goals in mind. Taking the emotion out of investing is a very wise thing to do in most situations, and sometimes it takes an outsider (such as a financial advisor) to help you push through the emotional attachment to certain investments.
Why Is It so Difficult to Retire Today?
A stressful retirement is certainly nobody’s goal, and in today’s show we cover 3 reasons why retirement is harder for you than it was for your parents. There are many more pieces to the puzzle today, you have to make more choices and have the opportunity to make more mistakes; and this alone creates more stress.
Reason #1: Social Security; your parents only had one choice – to retire at 65 and take Social Security; but today there are many Social Security strategies (it actually takes a computer program to figure out the best one!); making the wrong choice could cost you up to $200K for the course of your lifetime
Reason #2: pensions are becoming a thing of the past; it’s often your responsibility to set up your own retirement savings plan, and if you don’t start early enough or do it wrong (or both), you could run out of money before you run out of life
Reason #3: people are living longer today than their parents; you have to plan for decades in retirement, not just one decade or so