Retirement planning sometimes focuses too much on just how much money you can put away toward the Golden Years, when preparing should often concentrate on all the tools at your disposal, according to one planner.
Oak Harvest Financial’s Troy Sharpe says while personal decisions make up the bulk of retirement planning, there are wide variations on how much cash can be saved, keeping in mind that valuable possessions and outside factors should be considered.
“One of the most important decisions is when you elect to take Social Security,” he says, “because if you take Social Security sooner, you’ll have to withdraw more money from your accounts later, but hat extra time may allow you to compound and grow a larger balance later in life.
“And if you defer Social Security you have to withdraw from your accounts sooner but you have a heftier long term income,” says the host of the “Retirement Income Show” heard Sundays at noon on Newsradio 740 KTRH in Houston.
About half the people in a new survey published in USA Today said they’ll have less than $500,000 to retire on, so some of the advice calling for a million dollars will not apply, but there are other tools besides cash.
Can you invest in gold before retirement? Will you do part time work? How much inflation would you guesstimate there’ll be during your retirement years?
“Retirement isn’t about achieving a magic number, it’s about having assets and then using a combination of tools to replace what the paycheck did for you while you were working,” he says.