Enjoying Retirement
Ensure your retirement years are golden with smart spending and investment strategies to match your lifestyle.
Now that you’ve reached retirement, you’ll probably need to keep practicing the financial habits you’ve been doing leading up to this day. That means budgeting and smart money management to keep your finances in order and ensure you maintain your path into retirement. Because you’re retired, you’re likely comfortable with the disciplined behavior you need to save for the long term. The same strategies you used before retirement will continue to serve you well. Living within a budget is important now because you’re reliant upon cash flow from your investments to fund your lifestyle. But your spending plan can be challenged in retirement because you have more free time to spend money than you did when you were working full time.
Keys to Enjoying Your Retirement
- Create a reasonable spending plan: Living in retirement means monitoring your spending and planning accordingly for inflation to ensure that your investment earnings and additional cash flow meet your needs. If you set goals you can’t meet, you’ll quickly become frustrated or create an extreme penny-pinching reality that you won’t enjoy. And what’s the point of retirement if you can’t enjoy it? Start by setting goals that are reasonable so you can watch yourself make progress. You want to stretch yourself without breaking.
- Find an easy way to track your spending: Keep tabs on how you spend your money, but don’t feel like you have to track every single penny if that’s not your personality type. If you’re able to see where your money goes, you’ll be able to analyze your spending more accurately and pinpoint areas where you can cut back on frivolities that don’t truly benefit your life. This practice is a great way to feel good about the progress you’re making while you adjust your spending plan and goals.
- Maintain a diversified portfolio: This means more than just investing 50% in equities. You should create diversity within your asset classes to spread among different U.S.-based and international stocks in companies of various sizes and industries. You will experience greater risk within these investments than you will in safer investments, such as cash and bonds, but the growth element will allow you to build more wealth for your future. Similarly with bonds, you should spread out your investments to different holdings.
- Work with your spouse or partner: It’s important to involve your significant other in this process so you both agree on the plan. Without cooperation, a spending plan can drive people apart because a lifestyle will be forced on one person without his or her input. It’s important to give each other some cushion as you implement this plan, and get comfortable with its effects on your daily lives.
Make the most of your retirement years by creating a budgeting plan that allows you to experience life with less worry.