Retirement Planning Isn’t A Spectators Sport
Retirement Planning Isn’t a Spectators Sport
Are you Ready for Tomorrow? The future begins tomorrow, are you ready for it today? Who is in charge of making sure you are ready for tomorrow? If you live in a city such as Port Orange, you are centralized in an area rich in post-retirement activities. Daytona area beaches stretch from Port Orange all the way to Ormond. Along these beaches are attractions for tourist and locals alike. From first class restaurants and retailers to dog parks and even a botanical garden, you will have the time to enjoy them all. The question is will you have the money? Maybe you want to own and maintain your own boat on the canal, or fish under the Port Orange Causeway after retirement. Will you be financially sound enough to enjoy these things once you leave your working days behind? If you don’t start preparing now, your boat may just set sail without you on it. Retirement may be years and years away, but when it comes time to retire you could find yourself wishing you started with a different attitude toward your future. When you are younger it is easy to feel confident that someone else is taking care of your retirement plans for you, or not even worry at all about it. You sign the paperwork and understand that something with your paycheck is placed into something related to retirement. You are free to spend the rest of your paycheck on bills, entertainment, a night out with your friends. It may seem such a simple process, but how can you be sure if you don’t even know who is preparing the future for you? What Effects my Retirement? We live in an economy that is in constant fluctuation. The stock market adapts to the buying and selling of the populace, and the populace adapts their buying and selling to the stock market. The world of tomorrow may not include the job you are working today. Though it is a changing landscape, the changes are not rapidly noticeable, but they can be unexpected. Besides the sudden decrease in your income, why else is this important? The retirement you receive from social security is based off a formula, one revolving around your lifetime earnings. This formula has various parts to it, but broken down it is most influenced by how much money you have earned in your lifetime. Particularly the 35 years that you have earned the most income. The current economy can decide your job security. Recent studies have shown that today’s youth have the shortest employment spans of other generations. Most lasting from 3 to 5 years at most. Enough time to begin a career but not enough to continue or readily profit from one. Sometimes this is not the employees fault. The stock market can decide if a job is here tomorrow or not. Even if you are in no way involved with it, it doesn’t free you from it’s consequences. Along with damaging the appearance of a resume, it’s long term consequences can affect your retirement funds. What can you do to Prepare? Now that we know a little more about retirement planning and some things that can affect it, let’s look at some simple ways to improve your retirement. Below are some steps that can have monumental effects on the funds you will receive when you retire. Work Security/Career Building:Stated above, the stock market can greatly affect the work security of the common employee. How can you stop this from happening? Career building, compared to general labor, is one place to begin. General labor is labor that is commonly able to be performed by any physically capable person. Being such, it is labor that allows employees to be replaced by another capable body that can be paid less and receive less benefits. A career however will typically involve knowledge of a certain trade. To become knowledgeable in such a trade will require training that is supplied most times by either a college or technical school. At times work place experience will also supply the knowledge required. Because knowledge of this trade requires special training from either a school or from experience, the jobs become more secure. The less capable bodies able to replace you, the less likely you are to be replaced. Avoid Periods of Unemployment: Work security and career building will help reduce the chance of unintentional unemployment, but what about intentional unemployment? Perhaps you enter a job position that you are not currently satisfied with. Maybe the position you are currently at seems to lack the potential for advancement. In the early years of employment, it is understandable to have a short employment stand as you find your footing in the world of employment, but before you place your two week notice, think ahead. Don’t leave one job without another job waiting on you. Look at Retirement Plans Within your Company: Almost every company will offer some form of retirement plan. The most popular being a 401K, an amount of money taken out of your paycheck before taxes and placed into various investments. You will not lose anything from your paycheck past the amount you decide on. Various investments beyond that point though can increase or decrease your total funds within the 401K. Which is why you should look into our next tip for handling your retirement planning. Know Who is Handling These Plans: A company that offers retirement plans and programs will either have a representative to establish your retirement program, or have an outsourced company such as Vision H.R. to establish it for you. It is important to know who this person is, and how you can actively monitor your retirement. If you don’t understand, ask them to explain how your retirement program operates, and where your money is going. After all, it is money that drives the economy and decides your place within it, shouldn’t you be keeping an eye on yours? Start your own Retirement Fund: There are plenty of ways to build a retirement plan using social security and work based programs, but why not take the initiative to start your own? All you need is a plan and a little will power. Open an account at the bank to regularly place money in from each check. It doesn’t matter how much you put in, because every little bit helps. If you can put just 25 dollars into this account a month, the same amount you may spend on a night to the movies, in one year you will have saved up $300 dollars in one year. If you start this account at age 25, by the time you are at the average retirement age of 62, you will have saved at least $11,100! That amount could pay off a lingering bill or two, or is more than enough to start a new hobby for your retirement year. Life is happening right now, right at this moment. It can be hard to look to the future when you have to pay bills today. This doesn’t mean that you should turn your back to tomorrow. Preparing is as simple as talking to a representative and finding ways to make sure that today is working for your future.
