subject: Retirement Planning Resolutions For The New Year [print this page] No matter how much or how little you may have in your nest egg, you can always improve the management of your finances with a number of retirement planning resolutions for the New Year. These resolutions can help you make more money to cover your expected retirement expenses, make the most out of your investments, and enable you to prepare better (both emotionally and financially) before you finally quit the workforce.
Recheck your projected retirement expenses. After you have set financial goals based on these expenses and how much you expect in investment returns and other income sources, do the necessary calculations and find out whether these figures are accurate or not. Once you have ensured that your findings are accurate based on current market conditions, rates of inflation, and other factors, find out if you can still cover your retirement expenses with your expected earnings, and make the necessary modifications to your investment strategy, budgeting plan, and the withdrawal rates you will impose on your overall funds.
If you find out that you have made much more from your investments or expect to receive larger payouts from your retirement accounts, use the extra cash to reinvest or make additional contributions. You may also be an older worker who may be tempted to inflate your current lifestyle because you recently got a raise. Do not. Opportunities such as these are great as they allow you to put away more money for retirement, which is possibly the best use for the extra money compared to using it to make your lifestyle more luxurious today. Also, when you compare using the surplus cash now against in retirement, the latter is almost always the better choice.
Whether or not you are confident enough in how much money you will have in retirement, it is always a good idea to augment your nest egg by doing away with non-essential expenses. Of course, there are no hard and fast definitions for what non-essentials are; and it is up to you to identify these on your own. When you do, try to eliminate these costs as best as you can before you retire. Also, prioritize debt elimination to stretch your nest egg even further. These debts include mortgage and interest payments, credit card debts, and other loans.
Planning for a comfortable retirement is far from easy, especially as you will not have the benefit of a regular paycheck in your golden years. To help ensure that you will not draw down your retirement savings to the point that they are exhausted, implement these retirement planning resolutions in the New Year and the years to come.
