Two-stage retirement Archives - Jerry Golden on Retirement

Choose the right advisor for the center of your retirement plan

May 9, 2018 By Jerry Golden in Two-stage retirement Tags: Annuities, Estate planning, Guaranteed Income, retirement advisors, Social Security

Who is at the center of your retirement income plan? Do you decide randomly how to build your retirement, or do you choose the best options after careful thought and research?

Most people would say they are thoughtful and decisive, but the facts often prove otherwise.

In reality, among the several advisors we need — for money management, tax, insurance, real estate and more — the one we are most friendly with rightly or wrongly influences our decision-making.

There are plenty of reasons to choose one advisor over the others. One may simply strike you as more experienced. Or perhaps your kids attend the same school. Maybe you just click better with them.

It’s good to have friends, but that’s not the best way to plan for the rest of your life.

A multi-faceted team for retirement income

For a solid retirement, look back from the future – Part II

January 24, 2017 By Jerry Golden in Annuity, Two-stage retirement Tags: Annuities, Guaranteed Income, personal savings, retirement income, Social Security, tax planning

To paraphrase Marty McFly, who time-traveled between the 1950s and the 21^st century in a souped-up Delorean sports car, the key to a successful retirement is to plan “back from the future.”

Actually, Marty didn’t concern himself with retirement. But imagine how the rest of us could improve our retirement planning if we had a glimpse of what will really happen 20 or 30 years from now. We would know exactly how to invest our savings, what the cost of living or market returns will be, and what happens to our health, our kids and grandkids.

Alas, to quote another great mind, physicist and philosopher Niels Bohr, who won a Nobel Prize, “Forecasting is particularly difficult, especially concerning the future.”

That leaves us only with planning from the present.

Even as we all hope to live long and healthy lives, you’ll be a better planner if you anticipate what might go wrong in retirement. I said in the first part of this blog that I would tell you how and when to plan for the basic retirement objectives that will bring a bright retirement future. I call them the Three Ls: lifetime income, liquidity and legacy.

Stage I of retirement and Stage II

Good decisions, good timing improve retirement (Part I)

January 20, 2017 By Jerry Golden in Annuity, Two-stage retirement Tags: Annuities, Guaranteed Income, retirement income, Social Security

I read two books over the holidays that, while written for a general audience, can provide crucial insights into retirement planning. The first was a biography of two brilliant psychologists called “The Undoing Project,” by Michael Lewis. The second was “Time Travel: A History,” by James Gleick.

How are books about psychologists (Kahneman and Twersky) and time travel related to retirement plans?

My own insight is that a successful retirement is mostly about making decisions in the present – a lot of them financial – combined with a vision of how you want your future to look. If people understood how the decisions they made today influence their future, they would create a more secure and financially rewarding retirement for themselves and their families.

Lewis’ book suggested that people often make less-than-rational decisions, especially when comparing alternative choices. And when it comes to money, it’s even more challenging.

How People Make Decisions

Reader Favorites from Jerry’s Thoughts on Retirement

January 13, 2017 By Jerry Golden in Interesting Articles, Two-stage retirement

In retirement planning, it’s always good to take a look at the past year’s performance to decide whether adjustments are needed in your long-range strategy and short-term tactics.

I have found that the same holds true for blogging.

In the interest of understanding what content you enjoyed the most, I took a look at the 5 most visited blog posts on my site for 2016.

These included: More

Surprised by Election Results? Don’t Let it Happen to Your Retirement

November 11, 2016 By Jerry Golden in Annuity, Two-stage retirement 1 Comment Tags: Annuities, personal savings, retirement income, Social Security, two-stage retirement

As a longtime student of retirement products and planning, I’ve often been critical of most retirement calculators . I’ll go out on a post-election limb and say that it appears that most of the predictive election models suffer from similar limitations.

Retirement calculators supposedly help you determine how much money you need in the present to be able to enjoy retirement during an average lifespan. But the averages don’t work out for the situations of specific people, who aren’t average and whose lives are not governed by the assumptions built into the models.

Likewise, numerous election polls this year talked to small numbers of people and then extrapolated based on “average” voter turnout and preferences among several different groups. Even some of Donald Trump’s own pollsters told him on Election Night that he was headed to defeat, based on their interpretation of the numbers. More