Finance - Planning For Retirement

We think of retirement as a relaxing time when we can do exactly as we please. For many Americans, though, the transition to retirement is challenging - we're not used to that much time, we've spent most of our adult lives at work!

Planning ahead can make retirement much smoother. You'll increase your chances of living the good life in retirement if you plan ahead and follow a few simple tips:

Plan your time and money. If you don't, you may find that once you are retired you have no idea what to do with yourself.

This is especially important for all of you workaholics out there. If work has been your life so far, you need to find some hobbies and interests so that when work is no longer taking up your time you still have something to do. You don't want to save money and have time, and not know what to do. Your friends may still be working, or be unavailable; you need to know how to entertain yourself.

Know exactly how much you have. If you can't say how close you are to being able to retire, or whether you'll be able to retire completely or partially, you don't know enough about your finances. This is very common - many people don't have a good idea of where they are in terms of retirement readiness.

Don't guesstimate. You need to know exactly what you have. Figure your finances, and your likely needs and expenses during retirement, and come up with the dollar figure you will need to save in order to retire the way you want.

Rethink your coverage. Once you are retired, there's no job (obviously). It makes no sense to keep insurance against job loss as a retiree. On the other hand, you may want to take out a liability policy since you'll need to conserve your assets to live on.

Choose your lifestyle. Determine how you want to live in retirement. Are you going to stay in your current home, get an apartment, live with your kids? Move to a retirement community? Make plans before it's time to make the change. Medical expenses can really add up during retirement, you don't want ill health to limit your choices because you haven't already gotten your options mapped out.