It can be overwhelming and intimidating to determine the best strategy and tools to supplement your regular income in retirement, that difference between your predictable retirement expenses and your predictable retirement income. Most retirees will have some gap that must be funded each month. In this article, let's talk about the broad categories of tools that can meet this goal. Guaranteed Income Annuities A popular way to cover an income gap is through an income annuity. At the … [Read more...]

How much should you plan on spending each year in retirement? Does the amount that you're going to spend change over time? Does it go up? Does it go down? Plan on three spending phases in retirement and an appropriate amount of spending for each. How I describe them comes from Tom Hegna in his video below: Using Tom's description, we want to plan for having more money during the GO GO years. Will most likely want to spend more on entertainment, vacations, going out to eat, … [Read more...]

In our previous articles, we introduced the Buckets and Tools Approach to Retirement Planning. In essence, we categorize each dollar available for retirement among the four necessary priorities of liquidity, income, protection risk, and growth. Once we have all of our assets into the right buckets, how do we decide which strategy works best to achieve liquidity, create income, protect from risk, and grow our assets? In other words is there always a single best tool to cover my income gap? … [Read more...]

In order to delay Social Security, it requires a bridge of income while delaying, assuming that you have retired. There are many options for building this bridge, but many feel that they are giving something up in the process of delaying their Social Security benefits. Primarily they may see it as a trade-off of having to deplete their investment assets during the years that they delay. What if you didn't have to deplete the principle of your investments while you delay Social Security? … [Read more...]

If you're unfamiliar with The Windfall Elimination Provision (WEP), I suggest you read this article that I wrote about it. Most of the time, the WEP will affect individuals who have a pension from a local, state or federal entity. Recently I ran into a circumstance where the WEP impacted an individual who had both American and Canadian citizenship. Canada has a similar system to Social Security, the Canadian Pension Plan or CPP. It is very similar in many respects including the age for … [Read more...]