Jerry Golden on Retirement

How to Add Home Equity to Your Retirement Income Planning

June 9, 2024 By Jerry Golden in Annuity Tags: Annuities, Home equity, Retirement Planning, stay in home

Home equity is sometimes overlooked as a viable resource in retirement. You don’t have to sell your home to find income and liquidity.

With more retirees than ever choosing to age in place, the idea of selling your home to downsize may no longer be part of your plans.

That’s smart, because you don’t have to sell the homestead to produce retirement income and help cover the costs associated with a critical health crisis, or just the effects of aging that require outside care.In the New York Times article The High-Class Problem That Comes With Home Equity, author Ron Lieber, the NYT’s Your Money columnist, suggests that reverse mortgages could be a good product for some retirees who want to tap the equity in their home without selling. We agree, and the Go2Income planning method can now incorporate a reverse mortgage.

I have found that lifetime income, liquidity for unplanned expenses, lower taxes and a financial legacy are the objectives most retirees seek. When they also want to stay in their homes or age in place, I propose that annuities and home equity, added to traditional savings and investments, will best meet their retirement goals.

Is Your Retirement Solution Hiding in Plain Sight?

June 9, 2024 By Jerry Golden in Annuity Tags: Annuities, HECM, HomeEquity2Income, QLAC

Here’s how to use your home equity in combination with an annuity contract to produce late-in-life income.

Editor’s note: The earlier article How Your Home Can Fill Gaps in Your Retirement Plan discussed the “why” of incorporating the equity in your home in your plan for retirement income. This article discusses the “how.”

In retirement, your home means something more than it did while you were raising kids, getting promotions at work, and dreaming about how the future might unfold.Now, it can provide the opportunity that helps you realize your future in retirement — financially at least.

For most of us, our house carries much more equity than it did when we were just starting out. Home prices have more than doubled in the past 20 years. How to use that equity to benefit you and your family is a key retirement question that your home can answer. But as you will see, it may work better when combined with an annuity contract that produces late-in-life income.

How Your Home Can Fill Gaps in Your Retirement Plan

June 9, 2024 By Jerry Golden in Annuity Tags: HECM, HomeEquity2Income, Income annuity, QLAC, Retirement gaps

If you have gaps in your plan for retirement income, you might consider adding the value of your home to your planning.

Most retirement planning methods have ignored what for some retirees is their largest single asset — their home. That means the plan may fail to deliver on one or more of the five things retirees want:

Don’t run out of money
Grow income each year
Leave a meaningful legacy for kids and grandkids
Increase spendable income by reducing taxes
Build up a source of liquidity for unplanned or unfunded expenses

With the addition of the new HomeEquity2Income (H2I) program described in this article, Go2Income now covers over 90% of all retiree asset classes. H2I uses the equity in your primary residence to fill in the gaps in your plan that otherwise might require insurance that you don’t qualify for, higher-risk investments, or more aggressive assumptions as to yields and returns in your plan.Starting with this article and continuing over the next month or so, we’ll cover the why, what, and how of the HomeEquity2Income program.

First, the “why” of H2I.

For Longevity Protection, Consider a QLAC

June 9, 2024 By Jerry Golden in Annuity Tags: Income annuities, Longevity protection, QLAC

A qualifying longevity annuity contract, or QLAC, can help you define a better retirement for yourself by providing guaranteed lifetime income.

Please consider two new terms you should know in retirement:

Longevity protection. The steps you can take to ensure that the money you thoughtfully saved and carefully grew during your working years doesn’t run out before you do, no matter how long you live.
Qualifying longevity annuity contract. Commonly called a QLAC, this type of deferred income annuity funded out of your rollover IRA account provides guaranteed lifetime income starting at an age you select but no later than 85.

I’m not trying to turn you into an actuary or pension specialist, but an understanding of those terms can make a huge, positive difference in your plan for retirement income and your peace of mind.

A Challenging Retirement Plan Mission: Not Impossible

June 9, 2024 By Jerry Golden in Annuity Tags: Income annuities, retirement income, retirement plan

A reader makes a request that at first appears not achievable, but with some maneuvering of the retirement income plan building blocks, we find it can work.

A one-size-fits-all approach will never be a perfect solution when it comes to designing a plan for your retirement income. As it turns out, there are billions of potential combinations available to do what you want, whether that is creating as much income as possible, leaving a financial legacy, cutting the tax bite or covering inflation.

The best planning system does the best, if not perfect, job in meeting your objectives. Go2Income does that by examining the building blocks of a retirement plan and fitting them together in a way that meets as many of your objectives as possible.

However, when I got the following unique query from one of our article readers, I wasn’t sure that the Go2Income approach I’ve based on my years of experience, with some help from artificial intelligence, could address it.