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About Retirement Calculator, Inc.

Retirement Calculator, Inc. provides the tools and resources necessary to assist you in making critical economic decisions regarding your retirement future.

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Colleen's Corner

Asset Allocation

Often financial "experts" make asset allocation difficult to understand. My goal in this series of articles is for you to understand asset allocation thoroughly, in an easy to understand format.

How To Ensure You Have The Right Retirement Target Funds

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When you plan for your future, it's important to set goals. Among the goals that you should set are goals for your retirement target funds. It's important to know how much money you need to have when you retire.

When you attach a value to your retirement target funds, you'll be better able to achieve your goals. You will be able to look more closely at your investments so that you can see how to reach that goal in the most effective way possible.

How do you know how much money you'll need when you retire? Well, in part, that will depend on changes to the costs of living- gasoline, home heating, housing, groceries, and more, have all been associated with growing costs over the years. It will also depend on what you plan to do with your retirement: Do you want to be able to travel to exotic places? Do you want to be able to help finance your children's homes or grandchildren's educations?

All of the things that you intend to do with your retirement affect the value reflected in your retirement target funds. Your financial goals should allow you to meet your financial obligations, enjoy the lifestyle that you hope to have and allow you additional funds to cover unexpected expenses - moving to a single-story home or medical costs.

Once you've determined the amount of money that you need to reach the level of your retirement target funds, you need to figure out how to go about reaching that target. There are nearly as many investment plans as there are people: Everyone has a different level of risk that they are comfortable taking; everyone believes that one type of investment might be better than others, at least for them; everyone has a different amount of time in which to reach their financial retirement target.

But even though you have your own comfort level when it comes to investing, even though you may prefer investing in mutual funds to investing in stocks, and even though you have set your own deadline for accumulating money for your retirement, there are similarities to everyone's investment plan.

There are things that everyone who invests needs to know. When we built our free retirement calculator to help people analyze their financial plans, we took these things into consideration.

With our free retirement calculator, you can determine:

  • How the stocks, bonds and mutual funds you've invested in have performed over time;
  • How those investments are projected to perform in the future;
  • Ways in which savings and investments will be affected by interest and inflation rates;
  • How changes to your investment strategy will affect the way your savings grows;
  • How your retirement savings will be affected if you need to make a withdrawal from them before you retire.

And after you've had the chance to use the retirement calculator, you'll have the opportunity to talk with a financial advisor during a free consultation.

You can use that time to ask questions and get answers. You can use the time to discuss your retirement target funds and how to make investments that will allow you to reach them - possibly even to surpass those goals. And during that consultation you can form a plan and determine how to put it into action.

Rather than not reaching your retirement goals, why not take a few minutes to evaluate your savings. Build the best plan that you can to get to where you want to be. Just click the red button to download our free retirement calculator and get started.

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Retirement Homes is a comprehensive directory of retirement homes, retirement communities, senior housing, long term care and elder care facilities. Retirement Homes will help you learn about all your retirement living, senior housing, and long term care options in the USA and Canada.

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Retire In a Weekend

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Analysis of the Economics of Early Social Security Withdrawal

Robert J. Phillips
Chief Retirement Consultant

Deciding whether or not to take the early withdrawal of social security at age 62 can be difficult. If you need this income at 62 to fund your retirement the decision is fairly straightforward. Take it early! On the other hand, if you have another source of revenue to fund your retirement your decision will be primarily based on lifestyle, health and investment preferences.

Several factors can affect your decision. First is your life expectancy. If you are in good health and have a family history of living beyond 90 then waiting for full benefits may be best. Two other factors impact this decision. First and most important is the value of money or your expected return from your investments. If you are using other investments instead of social security to fund your retirement you should use the rate of return of these investments as your value of money. There is another way to look at the value of money. If you do not require the social security money to live, you can invest the distributions for the future. The rate of return of this investment is your value of money. If your investments will make larger returns such as stocks this would favor taking the early withdrawal.

The last factor impacting your decision is inflation. Social security includes an annual adjustment based on inflation. You cannot control this variable but you should be aware of its impact. If future inflation is significant it will favor a later full distribution

FREE Social Security Calculator:

Find Out Your Breakeven Age

We developed a calculator to assist in analyzing the impact of taking early benefits at age 62 or waiting for full benefits at age 66 to 67 depending on the year you were born...If you were born in 1960 or later your full benefits will begin at age 67 and your reduction for early benefits at age 62 will be 30%. If you were born between 1946 and 1960 your full benefits begin as early as age 66. We have included a chart that summarizes information.

To use the calculator you need to input your year of birth. You also need to input a value of money up to 10% and a projected inflation adjustment. The calculator analyzes income generated over time from both the early and full benefit investments. It calculates the age at which full social security will catch up and breakeven with the early withdrawal. If you were born before 1960 your breakeven age will be impacted by the year you were born. An early breakeven age favors waiting for full benefits.

The social security calculator is not the final answer whether to take an early withdrawal but it does give you additional economic data to assist in that decision. Ultimately you must balance income, investments and lifestyle to optimize your enjoyment during your retirement years.