Welcome to the round-up!
Below are the posts we read, found interesting and loved this week for a variety of reasons. They are inspiring and thought-provoking and we’d like to share them with you.
International Living
The World’s Best Places to Retire in 2017
This is a yearly list put together by the the folks at International Living and a great starting point to compare lifestyle and location for retirement. Is your Live Abroad location on there?
Check out our video on the same topic. Three Reasons To Retire Early Overseas.
Seeking Alpha
The Retirement Car Crash
This is a great article that discusses the income-retirement gap for six-figure and multiple six-figure earners. Yes, there’s a gap for these high salary earners too.
From the article:
“How you might ask is it that an executive earning say $200,000+ a year ends up with a retirement shortfall? Well it is a number of factors:
There has been a medical revolution such that over the last 20 years people have started living significantly longer. A retiree already aged 65 can expect probably to make it to his 80s or well beyond;
The cost of medical care during that retirement period however skyrockets as medical issues become more and more complex and not everything turns out to be covered by insurance. Approximately 85% of all medical expenses occur in the last ten years of life;
We became a society with unrealistic expectations. The $200,000+ executive expects a fine house, two cars, two holidays a year, private schools, to pay for his kid’s university tuition, and so it goes on. And this is not to mention the tax bill he’s paying on his earned income. A bunch of all this was really debt-funded, so effectively the executive spent chunks of his retirement money during his working days. Wealth inequalities have not helped tame these living standard expectations; in fact they’ve only exacerbated them;
What’s more, as the technology revolution progresses, the actual jobs available, even for the well educated, is probably declining as AI systems turn out to be better at accounting systems than accountants, or can offer superior diagnostic systems than doctors, etc. So the retiree may find even his well educated graduate child still depends on their parents for income!”
Have you read my article on the subject? Mind The Gap, Then Fund The Gap. We have the solutions to help you protect yourself.
Go Banking Rates
More Than Half Of Americans Will Retire Broke
The graphic really says it all. You’re not saving enough and neither is anyone else. In fact, as a group, baby boomers are hitting retirement age at the rate of 10,000 per day and 44% of them have less than $10,000 in retirement funds. If that isn’t a crisis, I don’t know what is. Just saving more isn’t going to fix this. You need to make drastic changes to your lifestyle and add income in retirement if you’re in this situation.
From the article:
Market Watch
One emoticon says it all about retirement in America
From the article:
“Yes, people believe there’s a national retirement crisis — though they say they’re not having one personally, Vanguard’s survey, “Retirement Transitions in Four Countries,” finds. When Vanguard queried 892 preretirees, 59% agreed that there’s a national retirement crisis but only 10% described their own retirement situation as a crisis.
Yet the new research (from Fidelity, T. Rowe Price, Bank of America Merrill Lynch/Age Wave, Bankers Life, the U.S. Census plus Vanguard) shows many Americans are, sadly, pretty clueless about how much money they’ll need for a comfortable retirement, how much they could withdraw in retirement to avoid outliving their savings and investing basics.”
While the article doesn’t offer much a solution to struggling pre-retirees it nails how people feel about their retirement situation. The industry knows there’s a problem. Investors know there’s a problem. You do have options if you carefully plan how you want to live in pre-retirement and retirement.
Here’s how you create a bespoke solution for your retirement needs. => Educate yourself!
Kurt Rosentreter
The Audi Generation: How Expectations will Ruin Retirement for Boomers
From the article:
“Couples have expectations that the Audi lifestyle, the clubs and vacations will continue to age eighty. The average boomer is heading towards a massive wall of disappointment when they find at 60, 65 or 70 that there is nowhere near the money in place to fund the lifestyle that has become their (or their spouse’s) expectation over the last thirty years.
“But Kurt, I have a financial planner like you helping me to figure this out! I won’t end up this way”. No you don’t. You don’t even know what your 2016 investment portfolio performance was or whether it was better than the S&P500. You don’t know what fees you pay, you don’t know the level of risk you take and you only hear from your salesperson when they want more money. . Let’s face facts – you don’t even know what their education is or what it means. Many of them don’t even ask you what your goals are – that should be your first indication that you should head for the door. But you don’t: you are intimidated, you are busy, they are your friend, surely they know what they are doing. Ha Ha. Get a grip.”
This is the article you need to read if you’re in your 40’s and 50’s and you feel financially comfortable. It’s a wake up call you can’t ignore. Your parents’ retirement is not your retirement and you should not expect it go smoothly. The author’s frustration with his clients’ not heeding his advice shines through in the text. Don’t miss this article.
Need a new book to read? Check out our New Economy Reading List for some well-timed inspiration.
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Thanks for reading!
Ian Bond