Planning is the key to being successful at everything including
retirement. Having more money in retirement is a goal that
is shared by many. Here are some ways to make it a reality:
One simple example would be the possible effects of delaying
retirement and continuing to work for two or three more years.
This decision could permit someone to delay taking Social
Security, and each year of delay between the ages of 62 and
70 raises benefits by about 8 percent a year. It also might
continue health insurance, add to retirement plan assets,
increase the size of any retirement pension, and reduce the
number of years that a person's retirement assets would need
to help fund their retirement.
The foundation developed MyRetirementPaycheck to help provide
basic retirement facts, not to permit sophisticated retirement
modeling scenarios. "The intention of this site is to have a
place to begin an enhanced conversation about how people might
manage the retirement income process," says Brent Neiser,
NEFE's director of strategic planning and alliances. "It is
designed to get spouses and loved ones together" to think
about these issues. "It might even be a good thing to [use
the site] to work with a financial adviser," he says, "or
to check out some of the advise you would get from an adviser."
The theme of MyRetirementPaycheck is to help people think
about putting together a retirement approach that can generates
regular payments to them that will cover their expenses and
provide a stable and secure flow of income in retirement. "
It helps people to think about the right questions to ask,"
Neiser says, and to understand the linkages between most
retirement decisions.
But while thinking about building a retirement paycheck is a
main focus of the site, it does not try to generate specific
retirement income numbers. "We purposefully did not design this
to come up with a number," Neiser says. Providing such interactive
tools might be available in the future. But NEFE's expert advisers
were concerned that consumers who have not saved enough or built
solid retirement plans -- and that describes most Americans --
would be discouraged if a quantitative tool told them they
needed to build nest eggs that seemed unrealistically large.
NEFE and other experts have noted that most of the advice and
emphasis in retirement planning is devoted to asset accumulation
-- saving and building a nest egg. There is relatively little
attention paid to what's called decumulation -- the process of
spending down assets to generate retirement income. In fact,
the NEFE site was until recently called Decumulation.org.
While that may have been a factually accurate title, it generates
no consumer awareness, and the site has received very modest
traffic. Neiser says the organization hopes MyRetirementPaycheck
will draw much more consumer attention.
