How To Plan For Retirement After Your Portfolio Drops
Here are some tips from John Nelson, author of What Color Is Your Parachute? For Retirement with Richard Bolles of the best-selling What Color Is Your Parachute career guide. Nelson is a retirement researcher and lecturer in consumer science at the University of Wisconsin.
He created a retirement model that has been selected for the retirement readiness program for federal employees. His Retirement Well-Being Model is a research and philisophically based tool to factor in health and happiness, as well as finances, as people plan and set goals for retirement.
Here is a summary of his advice to people in their 50′s and 60′s who have seen their retirement accounts shrink and now figure they will have to delay retirement:
Start taking better care of your health. It is easy to think you can work longer but many people effectively retire because their health deteriorates to the point where they can’t work any more. He recommends visiting a site called realage.com that is supposed to help you plan for your health in retirement. He says it will give a better idea about whether you really could be healthy enough to work those extra five years.
Nelson says you have five primary sources of income in retirement – personal savings, employer plans, real estate, keep working and social security.
He also mentions that the single most important strategy for planning a fulfilling retirement is figuring out how to stay fulfilled without spending a lot of money because many of us will have less money than we planned. We need to look at other forms of happiness besides spending such as working, volunteering or social relationships.
As far as what to do about the big drop in your portfolio… Nelson says to delay accessing your retirement account as long as you can. Giving your portfolio time to rebound is as important as trying to save more.
Wondering about dental insurance after you retire? Check out our post on Dental Plans For Retirement
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