Saturday, February 28, 2009

Does Your Employer 401k Need Help?

By David C Lewis, RFA

For most Americans who have not started planning for their retirement,individual 401k plans seem like a "good bet". A serious problem with this idea is the investor's reliance on employer matching for the plan. This could cause an employee to rely too much on the employer and not contribute enough to savings. Nothing will give you a wake up call like using a retirement calculator. You can find them on the internet from a variety of places. Retirement planning is hard, and it isn't something you just throw together haphazardly.

Even if a professional financial planner is helping you, the financial planning process is hard. There are a lot of variables. The age you want to retire at, when you start saving money, how much you save, and the interest rate you earn are just some of the many considerations you have to think about. One of the biggest concerns may be your health when entering retirement and how long you live after you retire.

Perhaps the most difficult thing to plan for is inflation. Inflation is caused by Government printing currency. Because that changes from administration to administration, it's hard to predict what policy will be 20 or 30 years from now. On the internet there are dozens of retirement calculators available, and there is a lot of information and ideas on how to plan for this. Some of them seem more plausible than others. In as far as retirement calculators go, what most of them will show you is that you simply cannot rely on Social Security. Even if you do, you will still need to save a substantial amount of money just to maintain something resembling a pre-retirement standard of living.

If the economy is able to grow enough to outpace inflation, your investments must be able to keep up. Even still, with inflation running 3%-5%, your investments are losing value and struggling to keep up.

Your parents and grandparents may have grown up in a time when a $50 a week wage was normal. Now, however, that's completely unrealistic. More than 50 years later, there is no way you could expect to live off $200 a week.

If you make $500 or $1,000 a week, you can expect a similar phenomenon when you retire. A retirement calculator will show that you should have a retirement nest egg near $1 million dollars to retire comfortably in 20 or 30 years.

One calculator tested online showed that an adult starting with an assets of $100,000 and adding $4,000 year to that nest egg would enter retirement with almost $900,000 but still be bankrupt by 85.

An essential part of managing your existing income is setting aside and investing funds for your retirement. Despite the difficulty of estimating your retirement income and expenditures, there is a wealth of assistance available on the internet to get you started, and professional advisors ready to help when needed. - 16036

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