วันพฤหัสบดีที่ 5 กรกฎาคม พ.ศ. 2550

New Definition of Retirement

A new definition of retirement is evolving. It’s one that’s focused on continual exploration, learning and growth. Where the old retirement promised no pressure and stress but left you with no personal growth, no stimulating interaction and no sense of achievement, the new retirement promises life meaning, personal fulfillment, and realization of long-held dreams and ‘fun’. It’s a time for discovery not felt since youth. What do you dream about? Is it owning a dream home at the lake? Or maybe starting your own business? How about going back to college or taking tree planting lessons? You might spend time with a loved one, help people who are less fortunate, or travel.

I believe the new word for this stage should be ‘opportunity’! After all, the sky’s the limit for the choices you have during this exciting time.

“In the U.S. alone, more than 10,000 people retire every day. In Canada, the number is over 1,000” (The New Retirement, Richard P. Johnson, Ph.D.). People are living longer with a shift occurring where retirees find new ways to contribute to society. People are also retiring earlier, on average around 57. For some, this means leaving the corporate world so they can enter and exit work projects, pursue education or travel. All of this requires planning!

Men and women entering the retirement phase of their life are the best-educated, wealthiest, healthiest, most accomplished generation in history. Yet, many are confused and highly stressed about what they begin to experience at this time in their life.

Through the use of assessments we can determine where you are now, and where you want to be. Through coaching, you can discover yourself and how to live the life you’ve dreamt of. Retirement is not an ending; it is a new beginning, full of possibilities and purpose.

"Tracey Fieber has been a very perceptive person in hearing the missing parts of what I say and unveiling them to me to perform better in my life," said Janet of New York. "She has helped me with marketing, using my time to it's fullest and structuring it to be used better suggesting specific ways to improve my goals when stumped for solutions. We enjoyed each other even during low times of life. I would recommend her as a proficient coach to help others as she has helped me move to the next level of success and understanding myself.”

Janet is in good company. One of the more than 76 million boomers turns 50 every 7.5 seconds, with every coming year over 4 million men and women will join the ranks of the 50-plus age group, according to AARP figures. "People turning 50 today have half of their adult lives ahead of them," said William Novelli of AARP. "They are beginning to use that milestone to enjoy new-found freedoms, make new choices, and dream new dreams." Not all retirees will want to pursue this new retirement. Those that do will want to discover their success with the help of a coach.

Tracey Fieber, CTACC, is a Life and Retirement Coach, helping professionals 45 - 70 to make their most cherished dreams clear, then bring them to reality by exploring their strengths and their best opportunities.

Tracey is an author and speaker in the fields of life and retirement coaching. Her coaching and teleclasses integrate her background including ten years of financial industry marketing, training and human resources experience together with personal and professional coaching. She is a Graduate of Coach Training Alliance and has taken advanced training in working with adult learners. Tracey travels internationally and offers retirement coaching on a variety of topics. Please visit her blog at http://www.coachingwithtracey.typepad.com or email her at traceyfieber@sasktel.net

“Five Strategies for Creating a Successful Retirement” is a free Teleclass held monthly. To register for this or a variety of Coachville classes, go to http://tinyurl.com/4og36

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Tracey_Fieber

Retirement or Financial Freedom?

In the past most people never retired. They died. The average life expectancy was much less than it is these days, and there were no financial planners around to help people save up enough to quit work. As recently as the 1960’s, if you did manage to save up enough money to retire, you’d be lucky to live another 5 or 6 years before you kicked the bucket. This made financial planning for retirement a little easier because you really only needed enough income for a few years.

Nowadays, if you retire, chances are you can live forever. Well, it can seem like forever…especially if you haven’t saved up enough money. It is a daunting task, attempting to set aside enough money to supply an income for 25 or 30 years, in the 15, 10 or 5 years you have before you retire. We say this because most people don’t get really serious about their retirement planning until they hit 50…and realize they had wanted to quit work at 55!

This is the standard model that has been followed since we began living long enough to bother with retirement savings. You set aside enough cash to cover things off at some future distant time. You build the nest egg and then hope it lasts, and the financial planning community is right there to help you. And yet this is not how the most successful people in our community do things at all!

Still, most people are busily trading their time for their money. As an employee, you are limited by how much time you can actually devote to your job, and you are limited by how much time you want to devote to your job. Time you give to your workplace is time you don’t get for yourself. It’s similar for self-employed people such as our selves. The more successful we are as financial advisors, the more ‘in demand’ we become, and the less time we have.

Retirement looks pretty good when you’re an employee, or a self-employed person. You’ll have the money coming in, and the time for yourself. The problem is that it is an awful long way off. Is there another way?

The first time Rick read ‘Rich Dad, Poor Dad’, he just got irritated. After all, this was the book that pointed out how he was locked in the self-employed cycle where success leads to less free time. And he likes his free time. However, author Robert Kiyosaki also proposed ‘an out’. It’s called passive income. Passive income is income you have coming in to the household that you don’t really work for anymore. The key is that it is designed to happen in the near future instead of the distant future.

Since reading his books we have begun to change our financial plan. Instead of continuing to organize our finances around future income for a distant ‘retirement’, we are re-orienting things toward near-future passive income and ‘financial freedom’. We have been doing this by purchasing income-producing real estate and by looking to start internet businesses.

The success of our new ‘passive income’ plan remains to be seen, but it is interesting to note how changing our end result from retirement to financial freedom has completely altered the path we’re taking. These two goals are NOT the same. When you build a retirement nest egg you are looking to draw an income from it at some future time. When you are looking to attain financial freedom, you are looking to purchase or create assets which provide you with ‘passive’ income right away.

Should everybody be changing their financial plan? Of course not. For one thing, many people hate the idea of being landlords, and many others don’t have the stomach for business, let alone the technology business. Retirement planning is still needed. RRSP’s, mutual funds, and other longer term savings programs still have their place. There will always be employees and self-employed people who rather like what they do and are quite okay working until their retirement age.

All the same, if you are wondering if there might be a better way to ensure your future financial wellbeing ‘sooner’, perhaps you should pick up a copy of ‘Rich Dad, Poor Dad’… and get irritated. Either way, it will probably turn out better for you than it did in the past.

In the past most people never retired. They died.

About The Author

Rick Hoogendoorn has been in the financial services business since 1991. Cheri Crause is a certified financial planner in Victoria, BC.

www.chericrause.com

rick.hoogendoorn@shaw.ca

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Rick_Hoogendoorn

Retirement is Never Urgent Until

If you’re like many people, your retirement savings have not been growing consistently over the years. We’re not referring to the wild fluctuations in the stock market, but rather the fluctuations in our short-term needs. Every once in a while, it just seems like a good idea to yank ALL those retirement savings out and pay for something.

You might need to pay for a down payment. You might need to pay off some credit card debt that’s nagging at you. You might want to ‘bugger off to Europe’ as Rick did some years ago. You know it’s not a good idea financially, but you do it anyway. Retirement savings are not designed to bail us out when we need this kind of short-term cash infusion but if it’s there…

As financial advisors, we have our ideals. Ideally, you should put retirement funds away and ‘leave it there’. Ideally you should never touch it at all, even when you retire! Why? Because it is the ‘earnings’ from the nest egg that you should be using, never the principal. As we heard one person suggest recently, your principal is like your ‘goose’, and you never kill the goose, because then you’re eliminating all those future ‘golden eggs’ (interest/earnings) it will lay.

As financial advisors, one way we try to prevent people from yanking out their retirement savings is by ensuring there are other ‘short-term’ funds available for emergencies. These are meant to act as a buffer zone against the yankers. It helps, but it doesn’t always work.

One problem is that a distant retirement will never be more urgent than the current cash demands you have. It’s impossible. How can long-term demands be more urgent than a current crisis? So what stops you from yanking out those retirement funds? Their convictions? Simple arithmetic? A more viable alternative?

When a client is bent on yanking out their retirement savings to pay off, for example, some credit card debt, telling them how much they’re going to lose in retirement income in 25 years time doesn’t seem to work. Even telling them how much the tax bill is going to be next year can pale in comparison to the relief the person is seeking from the anxiety over their current debt crisis.

So, the question is how can we provide ‘relief’ and still keep the retirement funds intact? Look at a debt consolidation loan? Review the person’s cash flow and create a debt repayment program? Maybe this will work for a minority of people. In the real world, when people are looking for relief, however, they are looking for relief NOW!!! The easiest way is to yank to retirement funds and be done with it.

So, in the moment, when you are in a cash crunch and seemingly have no other place to go, you will yank your retirement savings. Unless you have anticipated the problem and ‘pre-decided’ that under no circumstances will you access your retirement savings. In this way, you will do a pre-emptive strike on bad financial moves. Further, you will be cognizant of putting yourself into situations where you might risk those long term savings.

The alternative is to invest long-term, make progress, encounter a short-term cash crunch, yank out your retirement funds, survive the problem, invest long-term again, make progress, encounter yet another short-term cash crunch, yank out your retirement funds to get relief…

If you’re locked into an investment cycle like this, your retirement savings have not been growing consistently over the years, and it’s not just the market.

About The Author

Rick Hoogendoorn has been in the financial services business since 1991. Cheri Crause is a certified financial planner in Victoria, BC.

www.chericrause.com

rick.hoogendoorn@shaw.ca

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Rick_Hoogendoorn

What Age Should I Start Saving For Retirement?

Ask this question to 100 people and you will receive 100 very different answers. The fact of the matter is there is no right age to start. But don’t fret (did I just say fret?) knowledge is power!

To borrow a line from Star Wars, “Use the force Luke.” The force I’m speaking of is compound interest. Since our main objective is to find an ideal age to begin saving, you have to understand the difference between simple and compound interest. Simple interest can be figured by taking an initial investment that earns interest annually for a period of (let’s say) two years. After the first year you have your original investment plus the interest. In the second year you have the initial investment plus the interest for the second year, the interest from the first year is not added. What you’re lacking is that you don’t earn interest on the interest you already earned. It’s not compounded. Can you see where I’m going with this? With compound interest you take that initial investment and earn interest in the first year, then in the second year you add the initial investment plus the interest from the first year and earn interest on the whole amount.

Now that you know the difference, let’s see how two people use the force!

Person A starts saving at the age of 25. They start out with a zero balance and contribute $200 monthly until retirement (65). Assuming an average annual rate of return of 12%, Person A can retire with $2,061,941.74. Wow! Millionaire status achieved, two-fold.

Person B starts saving at the age of 40. Because person B is further in life, we’ll assume this person started with an initial investment of $10,000 and contributes twice as much, $400 per month, with the same 12% average annual rate of return. Person B will retire at the same age (65) with $886,803.53. Hey, that’s not fair! No, that’s compound interest at it’s finest. J

So, what are you waiting for? Put your pizza and cheeseburger money to better use and start saving! Your love handles will thank you for it!

About The Author

Brian Weiss is owner operator of www.InvestmentRunner.com a specialty search engine with free investors software, spread sheets, investors dictionary, and financial weblog.

admin@investmentrunner.com

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Brian_Weiss

Retirement Is A Scary Proposition If You're Without A Plan, And Running Out Of Time

Of the 75 million baby boomers nearing retirement today, many are:

* Debt Ridden


* Severely unprepared for retirement


* Under Funded


* Without a Strategy

This is a very serious problem in a country that we can all remember used to assure most people of a retirement where you are taken care of financially.

We all know that social security alone is not the answer to this problem. Many baby boomers are on the cusp of retirement without the ability to pay their basic living expenses with the money they will have coming in after retirement.

This means most will be looking for jobs to compensate, or they will be looking for extensions of their current jobs past the time they had hoped to retire and enjoy their lives comfortably.

Out of embarrassment, many people answer their friends by saying they wouldn’t know what to do with themselves in retirement to justify why they are still working to make ends meet past retirement age.

If you are in the situation above or can picture that situation in the next 10 years, there is something you can do to change that financial prognosis.

First, look at your 401k. Calculate what you could expect at retirement if you could actively manage it up to 8% more in yearly compounded return.

Depending on when retirement is supposed to happen for you, what kind of nest egg does that leave you as opposed to depending on the return you are seeing now?

A very simple but powerful 401k strategy that works with any 401k plan involves two things.

1. Awareness
2. Use of an index fund

By awareness, I mean tracking the value of your 401k holdings on a weekly basis if possible. With this level of awareness you can easily spot a portfolio decline. If it approaches a predetermined amount (5% to no more than 10% suggested) you should switch into a money market. Or if you are well informed and have the ability to do so, switch into an index fund that is designed to profit from a decline (a Bear Fund).

The biggest advantage you will gain is NOT letting your account value sink to such dismal levels where a 40%, 50% or greater gain is required just to get back to even.

This alone could significantly increase the size of your 401k over time.

Is this the only strategy that can safely increase your return rate on your 401k?

Not at all. You just need to know what most people won’t tell you. I have written a book on the subject called “Scientific Wealth Strategies.” You can find it at http://wealthscientist.com

I also have some more retirement strategies and resources located here: http://wwww.retirementinfo4u.com

Whatever your situation is right now, how much time you have left to make a change, and how much you calculate your need to be for a comfortable retirement, you cannot benefit from leaving things as they are.

Only education and strategic investment can net you the returns needed to have a safety net in place so that when you retire, you are not stuck in a constant monthly deficit spending cycle.

That’s not what retirement was supposed to be about. And it doesn’t have to be that way for you!

C.C. Collins is a Wealth Building Advisor and Author of “Scientific Wealth Strategies” at http://wealthscientist.com Find more information at www.retirementinfo4u.com

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=C.C._Collins

Justify Social Security ... Don't Save for Retirement

It is a common question when investors review their retirement plan—should we include social security benefits into our retirement income projections?

It seems the closer an investor is to retirement, the more likely he/she will include social security benefits into the analysis. Younger investors, however, may feel compelled to omit such benefits. They must then become mavericks on the retirement front. The choice is yours, but before you decide the influence of social security on your future, remember the following points:

When Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the social security act in 1935, he stated that social security gives some protection to American families. One reoccurring theme of his statement focused on assistance, not 100% protection. In the President’s words, “the law will flatten out the peaks and valleys of deflation and of inflation (source: http://www.ssa.gov)

For many, the Social Security Administration has raised the age of full retirement from 65 to adopt a more stringent schedule. This may be an addition of a couple of months or a couple of years. The administration justifies the increases due to longer life expectancies and general healthier life styles.

For example, those born after 1960, your full retirement age is 67. Going forward, we should ask ourselves “what other changes will be made to social security?” If you would like a complete schedule of retirement ages for full benefits, I recommend you visit Social Security's website at http://www.ssa.gov

An opinion adopted by many is to consider social security in part the closer you are to retirement. For example, if you are sixty years of age and plan on full retirement in five years, you should consider an analysis based on your current projected benefits. Even with the proposed reform plans, preservation of benefits is a priority for eligible citizens age 50-55 and older.

If however you are thirty, it may be better for you to omit such projections. The result will be overfunded personal savings. Thus social security will be an added benefit and not the benefit.

Consider the troubling issues of the 2004 OASDI Trustees Report: future scheduled benefits for today's young workers could be reduced by 27% or more if amendments to the current plan are not adopted.

Young workers should take note of this report. Do not rely on social security and concentrate on personal savings.

In conclusion, you have a risky option—there is only one way to justify social security, don't save for retirement. If this is your chosen route, be prepared for difficult times ahead.

About The Author

Wardlaw's belief is that familiar life elements best illustrate practical investment strategies; not typical investment jargon. With that philosophy, the author assists financial planners / advisors, brokerage firms, periodicals, and other investment information syndicates create informative and entertaining articles. For comments and questions, please contact the author at mailto:tools2invest@yahoo.com.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Kemberly_Wardlaw

Retirement Signature Frames - The Perfect Retirement Gift!

When most people think of a retirement gift, they think of a watch. It’s the tried and true gift that companies give employees to say thanks for all the years of hard work. It’s a great gift on behalf of the company but if you’re the lucky individual enlisted with planning the retirement party, you’re probably in need of a personalized gift on behalf of everyone at the office.

The perfect gift would probably be an affordable, personalized, lifetime keepsake from everyone attending the farewell party and yet something that would make a beautiful presentation to wish the retiree well on the next stage of their life. Is there such a gift with all these qualities and still be original?

Well, there is and it’s called a signature frame and it is able to encompass all of these great qualities by displaying pictures of the retiree surrounded with signatures and/or messages from friends and fellow co-workers. The signed frame, complimented with pictures and an engraved plaque will make a memorable gift at a retirement party.

Many signature frames are sold as kits and include everything from the pen for signing the mat board to the mounting system to quickly and easily add special photographs.

To make a fun presentation at the party, fill the frame with older photos of the person during their time at work and also personal photos of them throughout their life such as their hobbies, old graduation pictures etc. That way, when friends and colleagues sign the frame they will have a chance to reminisce about their friend while having fun looking at how much they have changed over the years. Be sure to take some new photographs at the party so they can later be added to the frame as a way to remember this final farewell memory.

This simple, fun retirement gift will provide years of happy memories for the retiree by displaying a lifetime of work memories while at the same time providing a personal memento from fellow employees and friends.

Shar Calder is the owner of First Class Framing a picture framing company providing ready-made framing solutions to display important life celebrations. Special collage frames allow consumers to display their memories quickly and easily. http://www.firstclassframing.com

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Shar_Calder