You are in the final stretch of your working life and retirement is becoming a reality. Your greatest worry lies in not having enough to retire on, having to substantially downgrade your lifestyle, and possibly being a financial burden to your children.

“…the decisions you make during the last 10 years of your career are critical to your ability to actually enjoy retirement—however you may choose to define that season of life.” *

Being in your fifties, your children should all be grown up and busy with their careers and families. Most of your debt should be almost paid off and you can finally start focusing on saving more for retirement.

Things to consider in the final stretch before retirement:

What does your ideal retirement look like? 

• What do you look most forward to?
• Will you stop working or work part-time or start a business?
• You need to visualise how you see your retirement years.

Work out an initial budget for retirement

• Look at your potential retirement expenses and work out a retirement budget. Remember your medical cover and travel expenses.

Now see if your retirement savings will be enough for the retired life you want

• You need to review what retirement income you will be receiving and from what sources – your adviser will assist you with this and provisionally calculate if your income is going to cover your new retired lifestyle. Remember, that people are living longer and need income for longer. You can make adjustments now to increase your retirement savings.

Decide where you will live

• Where you plan on spending your golden years, will determine how much income you need.
• Are you downsizing or relocating?
• Also, what your quality of life will be like – entertainment, healthcare, taxes, and cost of living expenses in your new location.
• Look at the pay-out ages of your social security and private pensions
• This will determine how much you would need to cover the shortfall, until all your pensions mature.

Health insurance options

• If you are relocating, you might need private health cover. Also, with age comes more medical treatments – there will always be extra costs over and above state healthcare. You might need assisted living.

Will all your debt be paid off?

• The ideal situation is to enter retirement free of debt. For example, all cars, loans, mortgages paid off. No debt means more pension to spend on your lifestyle.

You need to relook at your risk profile and see if it still fits your current portfolio and timeline till retirement.

• Normally, you would reduce your risk appetite as you get closer to retirement, to protect your wealth from any major changes in the market. Your adviser usually revises this on a regular basis.

If your retirement pot won’t sustain your ideal retirement vision - Don’t give up – you might just have to rethink how you will achieve it and possibly get creative. Consider downsizing some of the elements of your ideal retirement. e.g. one travelling vacation a year instead of two, country club memberships, one car instead of two etc.

It’s never too late. There is still time to add a little extra to your nest egg.

Chat to your deVere adviser about revising your entire retirement plan so that you can have a clear picture about what you have, where you are going, and how to get there.                                                                                                                           This will give you the peace of mind and confidence you need going into the final stages of your working journey. csvhelp@devere-group.com

* https://www.thebalance.com/

Please note, the above is for education purposes only and does not constitute advice. You should always contact your deVere adviser for a personal consultation.
* No liability can be accepted for any actions taken or refrained from being taken, as a result of reading the above.