Have You Started Planning for Retirement?
It's never too early or too late to start planning for retirement. If you haven't thought about your ideal retirement life, it's a great place to start your retirement planning. We're living longer these days, so you'll likely have many healthy years to explore your retirement lifestyle. To inspire you, here are some of the different ideas U.S. workers have about how they'd like to spend retirement:
- 65% - Traveling
- 59% - Spending time with friends and family
- 51% - Pursue hobbies
- 38% - Doing some type of paid work
- 26% - Volunteering
- 20% - Starting a business
- 17% - Pursuing an encore career
- 14% - Working in the same field
Bring Your Vision to Reality
Whether you have a fully formed retirement vision or not, the important question to nail down is how you will pay for it. Retirement funds come from a variety of sources, and many retirees have multiple sources of income:
- Social Security benefits
- Pensions
- Savings
- Inheritance
- Real estate
- Investments accounts
- Tax-advantaged accounts
Which of these do you have, which should you add, and how much of your income must each source generate? What should you do now to prepare?
What Is Retirement Planning?
Retirement planning involves the evaluation of expenses, income sources, savings levels and precautions to limit your risks. It can include a discussion of where to live, whether to downsize, when to stop working, and other factors unique to you.
Retirement planning is about managing your money so you can live the lifestyle you want later in life. With your vision in mind, a qualified retirement planner can help you determine what your preferred lifestyle will cost and the savings and investments needed to support it. Take a look at our retirement planning calculator as a starting point.
What Does a Retirement Planner Do?
Professional retirement planning helps you determine your goals and understand what you need to do to achieve them. When you engage with a Forest Hills Financial Group (FHFG) financial advisor, you have an experienced professional at your fingertips to walk you through the retirement planning process and to continue to advise you through any life changes that occur over time.
Your FHFG advisor is a qualified financial professional with experience in retirement savings vehicles. The first step is for your advisor to listen to you and understand your current position and goals. Our retirement professionals advise you on decisions that fundamentally affect your future:
- When should I take my Social Security benefits to optimize value?
- What kind of pension distribution should I take?
- Should I pay off my mortgage?
- What types of investments will be to my greatest advantage?
- Is a Roth or traditional 401k best for me? (Try our calculator)
- What kind of insurance best limits my risks?
- Is disability insurance paycheck protection right for me?
- When should I begin thinking about estate planning?
Choosing a Retirement Planner
If you're wondering how to choose a financial professional for retirement, you've come to the right place. For more than 41 years, FHFG has been helping people like you prepare for their ideal retirement. As an independent firm, we answer to you and you alone, not corporate shareholders. Creating a retirement plan that allows you to live as you desire in your golden years is our only goal.
And, when it comes to choosing a financial advisor to help plan your retirement, the choice is yours, not ours. At FHFG, we believe the right client-advisor relationship is of the utmost importance, because great relationships tend to produce great results. That's why we encourage clients to complete our Financial Advisor questionnaire.