Retirement Goals: Plan for Your Future
It’s never too early or too late to plan for retirement, and Fisher Investments is here to help. For over 40 years, we have been helping clients prepare for and enjoy a comfortable retirement.
Each investor has their own idea of a comfortable retirement. A common theme for many is to stop relying on occupational income to support their desired lifestyle at some point. To ensure sufficient income throughout your retirement, it’s essential to establish realistic goals, understand your investment time horizon and determine which investment strategy maximizes the likelihood of achieving your ideal retirement lifestyle.
Here are some steps you can take to establish your retirement goals.
Common Types of Retirement Goals
In our experience, clients often differ in how they picture their ideal retirement; however, here are some common investment goals we’ve observed:
- Avoid running out of money: Depleting their retirement savings is a common fear among investors. You don’t want to find yourself having to turn to your children for cash or go back to work during retirement.
- Maintain or improve your lifestyle: You have worked hard to enjoy your retirement years. You may want to maintain or even improve your lifestyle during retirement. This means you will need to maintain or grow your purchasing power over time.
- Increase wealth: If you are fortunate enough to enjoy the lifestyle you want without running out of money, your goal may be to grow your wealth over the longer term to leave a financial legacy for your children, grandchildren or a favorite charity.
- Spend everything: Some people want to spend all their money before they die. This choice could be risky since no one knows how long retirement will last.
See Our Investment Guides
The world of investing can seem like a giant maze. Fisher Investments has developed several informational and educational guides tackling a variety of investing topics.
Setting Your Personal Retirement Goals
To begin setting your retirement goals, you’ll need to determine how much money you need from your investments, how long you’ll need those withdrawals (i.e., your investment time horizon), and what type of investments you’ll need to get you there.
The earlier you set your retirement goals, the more time you will have to build up your nest egg to help you reach these goals and cover expenses during retirement.
Here are some questions you can ask yourself to begin the process of setting your retirement goals:
- What is your current financial situation, including all debt and assets (e.g., such as investment accounts, real estate, etc.)?
- Do you want to maintain your current lifestyle during retirement?
- Do you want to move after you retire, and if so, how will that impact your cost of living?
- What will your day-to-day cash flow needs be once you retire—including household expenses, taxes, hobbies and travel?
- Do you plan to spend all your money or pass on an inheritance to children or other heirs?
- Do you want to leave a legacy or endowment, or support philanthropic causes?
It’s also important to keep in mind that your living expenses could change over time. To help ensure you have enough money to cover those expenses, you should consider your investment time horizon—which may often be longer than you think—and the impact of inflation.
Once you have the answers to your questions, Fisher Investments can help you identify your specific retirement goals and design a plan to help maximize your chances of reaching them—which includes assessing your investment time horizon and determining an optimal asset allocation for your retirement investment portfolio.
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