Did you know you could save thousands of dollars in taxes just by planning your retirement timeline strategically? For many retirees, the years between leaving the workforce and beginning major retirement income sources—like Social Security or Required Minimum Distributions (RMDs)—offer a unique and often overlooked opportunity: the “gap years.” These years can be a golden window for smart tax planning that lowers your lifetime tax burden and increases long-term financial security. In this article, we’ll break down what gap years…
Category: Retirement Planning
When And How To Take Your RMDs
As you approach retirement, managing your savings and investments becomes one of your top priorities. You want to make sure you have enough saved, have the right investments, a solid distribution strategy, and more. But one thing that you can’t overlook is your responsibility to handle something called Required Minimum Distributions (RMDs)—mandatory withdrawals from certain retirement accounts once you reach a specific age. Failing to take these distributions on time can lead to significant penalties. In this post, we’ll break…
5 Ways to Make Your Home Easier as You Age
As you get older, it is important to start thinking about where you’ll spend your retirement. While some people opt for a retirement community, many would prefer to stay in their own homes (or “age in place”). Choosing to spend your retirement in your own home has many benefits. For starters, it can be cheaper than moving into a retirement community, is often more comfortable, and lets you stay active with your established social network. However, the reality is that…
Planning For Your Passing
Now we all know the reality, none of us are getting out of this alive. But despite people knowing that intuitively, there’s still a lot of procrastination around this type of planning. Depending on where you look, only 30 to 40% of people don’t have an estate plan in place. And while there are no statistics on this because it’d be impossible to determine, I can tell you from first hand experience as a financial advisor who talks to other…
Beware of the Financial “Expert”
We all search for people to learn from that we hope to eventually know, like, and trust. Especially when it comes to the complex financial world we live in. Instead of trying to figure it all out ourselves, it makes all the sense in the world to seek out experts who can help us understand the financial world around us. As a result, many of us develop an affinity to these so called financial experts. They are people we’ll never…
15 Things I Wish Every Retiree Knew
As we all know, there is a lot of noise out there coming from TV, newspapers, friends and family members as to what we should do with our finances, and how we should plan for our retirement. A lot of it, frankly, isn’t such great advice. So I’ve been thinking: If I had the ability to speak to everyone close to or in retirement, what would I tell them? Well, this is what I would say. 15 Things I Wish…
Huge Tax Bills Caused By Poor Asset Location
Last week we talked about the Essentials of Asset Location; basically, what investments we should put in different account types. In today’s episode, we go through a real life example of how very poor asset location ended up costing investors thousands (and in one case hundreds of thousands) on their tax bill.
Tune in to learn from their mistake and not end up with a nasty tax surprise.
The Essentials of Asset Location
Benjamin Franklin was right on the money (pun intended) when he said the only guarantees in life are death and taxes. As frustrating as taxes are, especially after you retire, there is a way to make them lighter using asset location. If you don’t know much about asset location, it is probably because it is so esoteric many financial advisors don’t even bother with it. Instead, they focus on asset allocation. While that is important, a large part of your…
3 Reasons Why 2022 May Be A Bad Year To Retire
I recently came across an article from a personal finance site that I typically really like. However, this particular article didn’t make a lot of sense to me. In it, the author comes up with 3 reasons why you might NOT want to retire in 2022. I disagreed with every one of those points, and I don’t want you to fall for the same line of thinking as the author, hence this episode discussing the article and why I disagree…
The biggest threat to your retirement that you don’t know about
There’s no feeling like when you are close to retirement and you know you have a really huge, juicy nest egg waiting for you. But what if I told you there was one tiny thing you may have never heard about that can ruin it? I don’t mean ruin a small part of your retirement plan, but all of it! Before you get too scared, hold on a minute… The flip side is that this tiny thing could make you…