This week, I’m talking about the What To Do Before You Retire In 2021. 

Today’s must-do checklist item you’ll need to tick off before retirement is to figure out if you can afford to retire. Yesterday, I talked about creating a retirement budget to answer a very important question: How much will you spend in year 1 of retirement?

Once you know what your retirement spending looks like, we can move on to actually figuring out if you can afford to retire. 

Can your income sources like your social security, pension, assets, and other sources of income support your income needs in retirement without you running out of money. 

It’s not an easy question to answer, so I recommend that you get some professional help here. If you’re already working with an advisor, ask them for help in figuring this out. 

If you don’t have an advisor, I suggest that you find one - even if it’s just to do this one exercise. It’s dangerous to try to figure this out on your own, because you need to get the assumptions right. 

Remember when the projected Covid deaths by the summer here in the US was going to be 2 million people? The reason they were so wildly off was because their assumptions were dead wrong. It’s the same with your retirement. You have to factor in return assumptions, inflation, taxes - none of which is easy to do. 

But it’s so critical that you take the time to do a retirement analysis to determine if you can actually afford to retire. Because if you can’t you’ll definitely want to know that before you put in your notice. Even if you’re dead set on retiring this year, running the analysis will still give you options like working part time or living on less in retirement, so you can determine what compromises you’d be willing to make if it turns out you can’t retire. 

If you haven’t taken me up on the Retirement Success Forecaster, I suggest that you do that, because it answers today’s question for you and whether or not you can afford to retire. Using data from a simple questionnaire, I’ll be able to tell you if you’re on track for retirement, and if you’re not on track, I’ll help you determine what adjustments you can make today to live the retirement you envision.  

Getting a customized retirement forecast is easy. Just go to www.truenorthra.com/retirementsuccess/ to download your forecaster questionnaire. Fill it out, send it back to me using the instructions in the forecaster, and I’ll send your personalized results for free - no strings attached. 

Thanks for listening. My name is Ashley Micciche and this is the One Minute Retirement Tip.

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