How to make your retirement money go the distance
Retirement should hopefully be a long and rewarding experience and you’re obviously going to need to fund it. Here are a few tips to assist you and your nest egg in supporting your plans.
Planning
Planning for an unknown timeframe is a challenge, but the bottom line is the more effort you put into preparing and regularly reviewing your options, the better.
A key starter is determining your needs. It might be worth sitting down with a financial planner to review your circumstances. Try to visualize the lifestyle you want during retirement – travel, moving house, new car, new hobbies, interests. Then look at the cost implications of this lifestyle and whether you’re going to be able to afford it based on your current income and spending.
Understand your retirement accounts
Take the time to review all your investments, accounts and other services to ensure they are the best fit for your retirement lifestyle. Rebalance your portfolio to align your finances with the most effective investments for this stage of life.
Income
An obvious choice for extending your income is deferring retirement. This doesn’t necessarily have to mean continuing with full time work – it could just be part time or casual work in order to create additional income. You might be surprised at the variety of work opportunities available as our workforce becomes increasingly focused on part time, casual and consulting roles. It may also be possible to make money from your hobbies or crafts.
Downsizing
While you might be comfortable with the lifestyle you have enjoyed for a while, downsizing on some aspects of life can assist greatly in getting more mileage from your retirement savings. Housing is the most obvious and usually the most beneficial in terms of boosting savings. This might be in the form of a smaller home but it may also involve looking at where you live. You might consider a more cost-effective suburb, shaving those mortgage repayments or bolstering your savings even further. The same downsizing might apply to cars, boats and memberships, just to name a few.
Health
As you may be requiring health services more often in retirement, remember that the most cost-effective way to approach this is through prevention by ensuring your ongoing health and fitness is as good as it can be. Keeping active with a healthy diet and regular exercise is the best way to stave off illness and health issues, often without spending anything extra.
Entitlements
Become aware of the broad range of concessions, discounts and entitlements that are available to you in retirement. Always keep your senior status in mind with future purchases and payments – it never hurts to ask!
Sell stuff
Now’s the perfect time to clean out the garage, attic and storage of all that accumulated stuff. While you probably want to save your biggest treasures for the family, sites like eBay, Gumtree and Craigslist are an easy way to make a bit of money out of items you no longer want.
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