"If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail." - Quote By Ben Franklin The Complete Retirement Planner - Stop Guessing, Start Planning.
"If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail." - Quote By Ben Franklin The Complete Retirement Planner - Stop Guessing, Start Planning.
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The Complete Retirement Planner Blog

8 Common Retirement Planning Oversights

Retirement planning, and financial planning in general, involves a lot of moving parts. You are already well-acquainted with many of them - income, expenses, and taxes are the most obvious - but once you start moving into the retirement phase, or at least planning for it, you have to be a bit more careful and diligent about what you think might happen going forward. When you are still working, if things don't go as planned, you have options: work longer, possibly get a promotion/raise or make bonuses to bring in more income, or even cut expenses and save more. Once...

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Who Needs a Financial Planning Tool?

Who needs a financial planning tool? If you're reading this, you do, and you're not alone. The majority of households don't have a comprehensive financial plan (they should), primarily because they don't have a planning tool capable of helping them to create one. This means that they are relying on guesses, assumptions, and/or generic benchmarks and rules of thumb for their financial planning. That's not good. Would every household benefit from having a financial plan? Absolutely. There is no better way to understand what you can, should, and should not do to achieve financial security, and to be as prepared...

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If You Can Make Catch-Up 401k/IRA Contributions, Should You?

For 401k and IRA accounts, the current annual contribution limit is $23,500 and $7,000 respectively. If you are age 50 or older, you also have the option to make "catch-up" contributions of an additional $7,500 to a 401k (for a total of $31,000), and an additional $1,000 to an IRA (for a total of $8,000). In addition, the 401k contribution limit for those between the ages of 60 and 63 increases another $3,750, ($34,750 total). Many people will be fortunate just to save the initial contribution amounts, but the question is, if you have the financial ability to also make...

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The New Long-Term Invested Savings Feature (2025).

In The Complete Retirement Planner, you have always been able to enter separate balances for Non-Retirement Cash and Invested savings (with separate interest/return rates for each). For 2025, we split the Invested savings into two categories: Short-Term and Long-Term Invested savings. The Short-Term savings category works the same as the original Invested savings, with expected investment return %'s being entered for both before and after retirement time frames to help account for any investment changes after retirement (less risk?). The annual interest/returns for cash and short-term invested savings are still taxed annually. The new Long-Term Invested savings works a little differently....

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Don't Have A Written Financial Plan? Here's What You Need To Know.

Are you one of the roughly 80% of households (per a Fidelity study) that doesn't have a written financial plan? Maybe you think that you don't need one. Maybe you have a DIY spreadsheet/back-of-the-napkin plan that you think is sufficient. Or, maybe you trust generic advice and benchmarks to guide you. If that's the case, with respect, I propose that you are doing yourself a disservice.  Regardless of your net worth or stage of life, having a comprehensive financial plan is a crucial step in assessing your current and future financial health and it provides a roadmap to becoming financially secure....

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