Seven Key Retirement-Planning Steps Everyone Should Take

Retirement is a landmark in every worker’s life. It reflects an end to a career or phase and marks the beginning of another life chapter. This transition involves a shift in lifestyle, career, habit, activity, drive, and passion.

After working off your energy over some years in any profession and retirement looms, it will be a catastrophic or unpleasant end if the modalities of the retirement are not worked out ahead of time. According to Prudential’s retirement preparedness survey, most retirees and pre-retirees plan on spending more time with family, traveling, volunteering, and setting up new careers. It is wise to plan ahead and save some earnings in order to accomplish your retirement dreams.

If you fail to plan your retirement, whatever tragic outcome that follows will be as a result of carelessness, lack of adequate preparations, and foresight. The tragedies that follow these mistakes include poverty, lack of fulfillment, illness, regrets, and depression. To best avoid these, you must follow these key retirement-planning steps everyone should take home.

Describe Your Retirement Plans

What some persons need is to describe exactly what their retirement plans are. When writing out your retirement plan, you have to narrow it down in the description. For instance, if the number one idea on your retirement plans is “vacation,” that is too ambiguous and difficult to estimate. Instead, describe it as “a two week trip to the Bahamas,” which is quite easier to plan and visualize. Simply put, descriptive plans are more practical than general plans.

Start Monetizing Your Skills

There are probably some extra skills you’ve got that are not part of your mainstream job. You can start thinking about ways to make money off them. Whatever is accrued can be channeled into your retirement savings. This is because your retirement savings can be bulkier when there are multiple streams of income that pour into it. The more your retirement savings are, the better your chances of attaining your retirement goals.

Take, for instance, you are an amateur music composer or an unpublished author; more time can be channeled towards these affairs in order to make them productive.

Make out some time and update the list of your skills. Even if they are unrefined or crude skills, they can be your cash cow in your retirement days and even before it when the adequate efforts are made.

Your Health Demands Doctor’s Examination

A healthy man is a happy man. Generally, retirees are persons who are advanced in age. With the average age of all retirees being sixty (60), that coincidentally is the period for the onset of most fatal diseases.

At that stage, diseases such as hypertension, high blood pressure, Parkinson’s, cancer, and organ failure begin to manifest for most persons.

When retirement looms, you must book an appointment with your physician for general tests. It is even better when you are covered under a health insurance at your place of work.

Under the guidance of your doctor, chart out a different and more healthy diet for yourself. This is because, at your age, your organs are becoming weaker. They will flop if they were to digest, at your advanced age, the kind of foods you used to eat at your youthful age. Also, decide exercises that you will begin to engage in. Mild physical exercises can become a routine. Moderate mental tasks like reading articles are also useful.

Decide When You Will Apply For Social Security

Your retirement benefits are due to you and are your rights, if only you meet the requirements to trigger the disbursement. If you are qualified for pension or social security benefits, it is wise to choose an appropriate time for collecting them. Take for instance, if you apply for your social security long after retirement, you are entitled to 100% of it over the months.

However, when you apply a lot earlier, you can not obtain 100% of the social security- at most 99% and the least is about 76% of your benefits. The percentage of benefits you are entitled to depend on the time of your application. Regardless of your marital status, be it single, divorced, or married, the patient dog eats the fattest bone. In other words, the latest applicant receives the most percentage. Nevertheless, the right to your benefits will be removed when you reach the age of 70.

Estimate Your Retirement Budget

A good retirement budget must cover the following features

• Amount of cash that flows in.
• Total estimate of cash that can bring your retirement goals to life.
• Total amount of your liabilities.

In the coming months, begin to record your cash in-flow as well as spending. After that, find out the total amount of money required to actualize all your retirement goals.

If there are carry-over debts, do well to diminish them as well. In every month, attempt to reduce your debt to some certain percent. To make it easier, start paying off the smaller debts first; otherwise, you can settle the most pressing ones first.

Spend Less, Save More

If your retirement date is close by, then it is time to adapt to what lays ahead. Efforts must be made to become less spendthrift. First of all, make a list of the bills you pay regularly, then find a way around to reduce the list. There are definitely some of those bills that you can survive without paying for.

Take, for instance, you may reduce your subscribed channels from 200 to 170. Again, you can decide to have dinner at a restaurant every fortnight instead of every weekend.

Stay True to Your Retirement Plan

It is in human nature to return to old ways over the course of time. Indiscipline may be an issue for such persons who can not make a plan and stand by it until the end.

Retirement planning takes wisdom, time, and expertise. Many people who do not know the right way about it end up making unrealistic retirement plans, which they will ditch in the end. It is paramount you follow the necessary steps to create a workable retirement plan which will guide you into stability and fulfillment after you are retired.

After all, if at the end, what you saved up will not be able to sustain you after retiring, or heavy debt tolls are dropping your neck down, you can take a loan as a retiree.