I am going to repeat a well repeated saying, "If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail". Retirement is one area where that adage is so appropriate. Our abilities and opportunities follow a bell curve and we need to prepare for that downward slope while we are still trudging upwards.
Plan the quality of your retirement: Do you foresee a quiet time with the family? Or do you see cruises and golf? Can you move to a low tax/ low cost city/state/country? Or do you want to stay with old friends? You will need a smaller home, but you will need more for healthcare. Do you want to work part time or just quit it all and run to the beach? Work through the details, but have a plan. Have a Plan A and a Plan B. Then work backwards.
The least you need to know about your retirement is:
1. How much annual income would you need?
2. How big should your 'Nest Egg' be?
Retirement Calculator:
There are quite a few retirement calculators on the web and some of them are pretty good, but if you are the kind who likes to control all assumptions, here is a (very) basic downloadable calculator, where you can see and tweak a lot of your retirement variables
Basic Retirement Calculator
[File--> Download as -->Microsoft Excel. Then you can play around with the file in Excel]
[File--> Download as -->Microsoft Excel. Then you can play around with the file in Excel]
Option 1: Change the orange cell to your required retirement income. Then keep tweaking the green cell till you see the red "OK" on the right.
Option 2: Change all the yellow shaded cells as you see fit - the orange and green cells will calculate automatically. Tweak the necessary yellow cells till you see the red "OK"
Other retirement calculators on the web:
VanguardFidelity
Related Blog Pages:
Net Worth
Wealth generation 101
Back to blog posts:
When Can You Retire?
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