One of the articles I read from Time magazine this week aimed to provide four key numbers intended to make retirement planning less daunting.
If only retirement planning were that simple – just remember four numbers and everything about retirement will take care of itself.
These “numbers” or “rules of thumb” presuppose a particular approach for accumulating and distributing your retirement savings.
However, the assumed approach is not the only method. The approach we favor deals with only one number. 100%.
We focus on getting to a place where 100% of your planned-for expenses are covered by real income.
There’s nothing daunting about retirement when you know you’ve got it covered!
As we’ve reported in this blog, retirement calculators fail for lots of reasons. Researchers at Baylor and Texas Tech have published a study that only proves our point.
However, it’s not so much the calculation that is flawed, it’s the strategy being measured.
Developers of these calculators, which evaluate “withdrawal” strategies, fail to consider more effective strategies involving income annuities and debt.