Planning For Unexpected Costs Before You Retire

Your retirement planning needs to incorporate more than just investments

Your giving heart coupled with your destitute relatives can threaten your retirement savings – savings you soon may need. Statistically, if you’ve reached 65 there is a strong probability you could live into your 90s and need income for longer than previous generations.

While might be feeling the pressure to further contribute to family finances in ways you hadn’t planned, consider the true cost to your future before you write that well-intentioned check.

Examples might include:

Your child needs a loan, or your sibling needs help paying bills.
Your mother with dementia must go into assisted living but lacks long-term care insurance (LTC)
Your parents may also live longer and need financial assistance in those years.
Your kids may boomerang after college or in early adulthood, moving home to live with you again for years.

And how many of us ever really plan for divorce? But did you know that:

The Journals of Gerontology found that more than 1 in 4 people getting divorced in the United States are over age 50, and over half of those divorces happen after 20 years of marriage.
Pew Research data from 2017 found that the rate of divorce after age 50 nearly doubled over the past 30 years.

Divorce usually stretches both parties financially and creates more complicated domestic situations – often creating need for frequent financial help, as well.

Don’t Wait to the Last Minute

These issues only get more complex as retirement approaches, and with it your fears of outliving your money and becoming a burden on your family.

Few families discuss long-term care needs or even how to approach planning for elder care. Only a little more than a third (37%) of those 50 and younger believe they will need long-term care, for instance, when in reality 70% will eventually need it, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

Out-of-pocket elder care for either you or your relative drains savings fast. Costs range from an average of $18 an hour for in-home care to some $10,000 a month for private care in a nursing home.

Alzheimer’s disease is another top fear. The study reports that nearly half of people 85 and older have Alzheimer’s or related dementias. No doubt most of those retirees prefer to remain in their own homes.

You need to know about the costs of retrofitting you home to accommodate an elderly relative, and what long-term care insurance does and doesn’t cover when under your roof. Your use of long-term care insurance to cover home health care often reduces the policy’s lifetime benefits, for instance. How much coverage remains for institutional care if you eventually need it?

When handling these very personal and complex issues, consult your financial advisor, an elder care attorney and maybe a geriatric specialist. At the very least, think about whether you are becoming the family bank and if you should build the costs into your retirement plan.

How The Wealth Guardians Can Help

Remember this: when you plan for retirement – no matter how far away it might be – you need to model your financial expenses, anticipate unexpected expenses, think about your lifestyle choices, account for future inflation, and make various market assumptions. More importantly, these must be modeled within the confines of your risk profile and goals.

But when you run these models, you will undoubtedly struggle between your current and your future–retired–self. For your own well-being, favoring the future you is the best choice. Trouble is, this is very hard to do.

That’s why we developed our Custom Retirement Paycheck Plan.

This free, custom designed report takes all of these factors into account by outlining how to protect your retirement from the risks of unexpected market swings, tax changes, and health care expenses using a mathematically tested strategy to create lifetime income allowing you to stop worrying about outliving your money and get on with enjoying the rest of your life.

Let us show you in black and white a custom retirement income plan that is comprehensive, individualized and based on strategies that balance growth with downside protection. Get your Custom Retirement Paycheck Plan now!

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Give us a call at our Charlotte office at (704) 248-8549, or our Clemmons office at (336) 391-3409. Or, click here to request a no-cost, no-obligation meeting.

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