Episode 67: What Should I Do If I’m 5 Years from Retirement?

Today we’re here to answer your question, “What do I do if I’m 5 years away from retirement?” Here are five things for you to think about if you’re in this position.

1. Assess your expenses

First, you’ll want to start to get a little bit of an idea of what your expenses are. Ultimately, people that are looking to retire want to be able to live their lifestyle and do the things that they want to do. So the question being is how much does that cost you? What are the things that you want to do in retirement and how do you want to enjoy your lifestyle?

2. Identify Your Sources of Income

Next, you should get a little bit of an idea of what your income sources are going to be in retirement. Are you going to have any type of pension income when you retire? How much will your Social Security be when you retire? Now, obviously, Social Security is a bigger question in and of itself, but the amount of your Social Security is going to depend on your earnings history when you were working and ultimately when you take Social Security, what age that is.

3. Formalize Your Retirement Plan

What a retirement income plan will do is it’ll take into account those expenses that you’ve assessed, the income that you’re going to have in retirement and also put that together with longevity and inflation aspects and bring in the rest of your nest egg and give you that answer to that question of, “Am I OK? Am I in good shape to retirement or should I be doing things now to fix the scenario?”

4. Assess Your Risk

One thing to think about is the risk that you took in growing and saving the nest egg that you’ve built up at this point in your life is probably not the same risk that you want to take. Now that you’re on the cusp of retirement, or even if you are retirement. Yes, we want some degree of growth on our money, but you’re likely going to be producing income and peeling some off of your money progressively over time so you can enjoy your lifestyle. So essentially what you want to be doing is focusing on a steady, consistent rate of return and minimize the downside. Now is not the time to take a ton of risk, because the danger of that could be potentially going backwards to a very great degree, maybe on the cusp of retirement or in those first few years of retirement, which are so, so critical.

5. Consider Long-Term Care Insurance and Other Health Care Expenses

And finally, if you’ve done all the proper income planning, the next thing that comes to mind is, well, gee, what if we’re all set but one of us gets sick? So we’re starting to assess your susceptibility to Long-Term Care expenses is the next thing that you need to do approaching retirement.

Takeaways

These are just a few things you can do to help you prepare for retirement, if you’re about 5 years out from your target date. Don’t forget the importance of considering professional assistance with these kinds of decisions and strategies.

Thanks for joining me and I hope you found this information helpful!

P.S. If you enjoyed this topic and want to learn more, download your copy of our guide, “Pre-Retirement Checklist”.

P.P.S. Feel free to submit questions here for a chance to have them answered!