Welcome to a new week and a new theme here on the One Minute Retirement Tip! 

This week’s topic is: Stress test your retirement. If you’ve ever had a stress test on your heart, you know exactly what I’m talking about. A cardiac stress test is a test that measures your heart's ability to respond to external stress in a controlled clinical environment. Under the careful monitoring of your doctor, they can see what your heart can withstand that can guide future decisions and treatments. 

Well, you can do the same type of controlled test on your retirement portfolio to see the potential holes in your plan and address them before they lead to major issues down the road. 

You can’t just plan for retirement hoping for the best, so I’m spending each day this week talking about some likely scenarios - stress tests if you will - that you can throw at your existing retirement plan that could derail it. 

Just like the coronavirus pandemic was out of the blue and unexpected, the same is true for other types of derailments - like will you be okay if your social security checks get cut or if inflation is higher than you planned for. Or what happens to you if your investment portfolio drops 25-30% or more 3 years into retirement. 

The point is not to scare yourself, but to better understand how these types of events could alter your planned course in retirement and think through the options if such an event occurs. Thinking through a stress test in advance will help you logically process the what-if or worst-case scenario in a low-stress, controlled environment so you can rationally prepare for how to deal with these events that you might face down the road. 

So this week, I’ll walk you through the important exercise of the what-ifs so you can do like your cardiologist and stress test your own retirement. 

That’s it for today, but before you go...If you haven’t already left a review for the One Minute Retirement Tip, please consider leaving an honest review in Amazon or iTunes. I read them all, so feel free to leave any feedback or topic suggestions there too. 

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

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