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 During Retirement, What Planning Should Retirees Do Before They Retire
Be sure that your financial planner has some concept of what retirement investing is, prior to engaging him/her to handle your financial plan. Retirement investing means what will you do, and how will your investment goals change, once you retire. Remember that you will either be continuing to follow your original goals, or you may be adding new goals, once you retire. (If you change your goals once you retire, it may be too late to accumulate large sums of retirement income, but if you change your retirement goals before you retire, and as soon as you can, you will have time to accumulate, or at least consider accumulating, addition revenues).
Retirement investing can be somewhat tricky, since you may still have the need to earn or build additional wealth. If you retire at age 65 and live to age 90, you have 25 additional years to add income, which may be considered to be an entire career. Because you are 65 or 78 or 89, there is no reason to stop investing your money to try to earn more, so long as you are not depriving yourself of monies you may desire to spend in your retirement years. The trick in retirement investing is to be somewhat careful about the investment risks you take, because you may not have many years to recover from any mistakes or missteps. Research particular stocks in more detail is always helpful, and diversification could be a positive investment tool to apply to minimize losses. Heating oil futures, or a hotdog franchise might not be the right investments for you at this stage of your life.
Perhaps the best piece of information is to be realistic about your expected returns and to make adjustments in some investments to tailor you portfolio to a more realistic return oriented approach. Also, if you feel compelled to take some risks, offset this desire with more bonds or CD’s or other more secure investments. In this manner, you may be able to get your "high return need" out of your system, or at least corner it so that you do not endanger the rest of your investment accumulation. Some investors will no longer be able to invest in equities or mutual funds and still maintain their needed sleep patterns. As a result, more of the fixed-income securities might be helpful to that type of investor.
If you are over the age of 65, you ought to be concerned about buying any Securities offered via the telephone. This does not mean that at age 64 you have all of your faculties and at age 65, you can never make another informed decision again. What happens as you approach the retirement age, is that you are more susceptible to fear, since you know that your work income is about to vanish. You are also the target of more "con-games," since these people prey on older people and their fears, and they find your telephone number by doing profile searches [e.g., give me a list of all people over age 65 in main County]. These people find you at certain periods in your life and you must be ready for it. If you are asked to sign a contract, have an independent lawyer read it and help you. If you are reading this, chances are you also have a full-service legal plan available to you whenever you need it. Use its benefits to help you. You will prevent more problems than you may ever imagine.
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