Women’s Series: How do you know that you’re saving enough for retirement?
The truth is you will never know if you are saving enough for retirement. Until, that is, you either get to retirement and you don’t run out of money or you do some pre-retirement planning. My suggestion is take the mystery out of it.
“Women tend to take care of everyone else’s needs first – and that includes money. Most women, if they have to choose between saving or sending their child on a field trip, they’ll chose the trip.” 1
The quote describes most women; we all want to take care and satisfy the needs and wants of our loved ones first and at times put our own needs and wants off.
A good first step to understanding your short term financial goals and your long term retirement goals to ask yourself the two questions below; try to think short term: 1 to 3 years and long term: 10, 15 and 20 years out:
- What are my financial hopes?
- What are my financial worries?
Write down your top financial hopes and your top financial worries that come to your mind first – keep it short. Your savings & retirement planning should revolve around these top hopes & worries. This is a good first step to finding out if your current savings plan is working towards your retirement hopes and wishes.
The next step is making sure your actual savings dollars are going to be able to meet your specific retirement goals. We assist you to do this through our Family Wealth Planning Process. If you are interested in learning more about the steps to this process please go to our website: https://windsorwealth.management/WealthManagement.11.htm. This process is very interactive –you are always in control. We provide suggestions throughout the process. And, where appropriate, advice on which changes may satisfy the tug of war between short and long-term goals.
You will never quite know if the future will pan out as you expect. Our experience, nevertheless, suggests that those folks which have a plan have a tendency to get closer to where they want to be.
A good starting point in order to save enough for retirement is to do some planning: Think about what’s important to you and your family. Being able to understand the tug-of-war between today and tomorrow and putting pen to paper may take you further than you expect.
To learn more about how we help women in our community please click the link to our Women & Wealth webpage: Women & Wealth
If you have anything to add or would like to learn more about a specific topic please let me know and I’ll be happy to add it to the newsletter topic list.
Next month’s topic will be: Social Security & Medicare updates and issues
Christina Jones
Financial Planner
CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER™
Christina.d.jones@raymondjames.com
- Fox, Laurie. Financial Planning For Women: Building Your “Snowball.” Retrieved from https://www.ehow.com/feature_8329636_financial-planning-women.html
The foregoing information has been obtained from sources considered to be reliable, but we do not guarantee that it is accurate or complete, it is not a statement of all available data necessary for making an investment decision, and it does not constitute a recommendation. Any opinions are those of Christina Jones and not necessarily those of Raymond James