The Complete Retirement Planner Blog

It's one thing to plan for retirement by saving diligently year after year, but quite another to shift your focus to how much of those savings you will need to actually spend each year once you retire. Essential bills will always need to be paid no matter how much you are able to reduce expenses, and seeing your savings balance decline instead of increase can cause a bit of a shock. The immediate question then becomes, "How much can I withdraw each year and still not run out of money?". There's no shortage of articles offering advice about solving that...

As you create a financial plan, major concerns about how much to save, how much you will be able to withdraw from savings each year, how long will your savings last, etc. often take center stage. One consideration that doesn't get as much attention is how much of your savings should be kept in cash. Before you retire, a common rule of thumb is to always have at least six months expenses in cash. This is mainly to help protect you if you should lose your job, or incur significant unexpected expenses. But is this enough after you retire?The good...

The 2024 version of The Complete Retirement Planner (TCRP 2024) has just been released!As always, the 2024 update includes the most current tax laws, retirement savings contribution limits, I.R.S. RMD rules, and Medicare costs, as well as several new features that further enhance the already extensive capabilities of TCRP: • The biggest change for 2024, especially for returning customers, is that there are no more Excel macros (or our famous green buttons)! Hopefully, even new customers will appreciate our commitment to keeping TCRP as easy to use as possible. TCRP has always used Excel macros to allow users to click...

There are countless articles written every day offering insights and advice about financial/retirement planning. With so much information available you would think that anyone interested in reading those articles could easily become an expert (near expert?) on the subject. The problem - and I'm sorry to say this - is that many of the people writing those articles are hardly well informed on the subject. Many have no financial credentials and are just piecing together random quotes from their sources and presenting generalizations and half-truths as "rules" and best practices to follow. They may have good intentions, but it makes...

A financial retirement plan covers a lot of ground, and the more variables that are included the more reliable the plan will be. But you can't forget that what you are ultimately doing is trying to forecast the future, which we all know is an exercise in frustration. That doesn't mean that it isn't worthwhile - it's important to to be as prepared as possible so that you can take steps to protect yourself - you just need to keep in mind that things will likely not turn out as you expect. As the saying goes, "Hope for the best,...