10 Critical Pieces of Your Retirement Plan

Joe and Al discuss the 10 most critical parts of your retirement plan. These include: creating a financial plan, integrating tax planning, considering Roth IRAs, having a withdrawal strategy and looking at controlling risk and asset allocation.

1:49 “It looks like the extender’s bill is about to pass; what it means to you is a lot of tax breaks”

3:38 “Once you accumulate wealth and you have a nest egg, that’s when things get a little bit more complicated because emotion drives a lot of decisions at that point”

7:13 “By having a plan, even if it’s a one-page plan, you start having constructive ideas of what you need to do. The sooner you do that the better”

9:58 “You have to integrate tax planning into the overall [retirement] strategy”

10:33 “We see clients of ours in the same tax bracket in retirement, and in many cases higher tax brackets in retirement”

15:35 “You’re actually allowed to convert as much or as little of your IRA as you want to each and every year [to a Roth IRA]”

17:21 “People aren’t realizing that taxes don’t stop when their paycheck does; Social Security, pension, taking money out of 401(k)s and IRAs—it’s all taxable. When you tap that retirement nest egg it comes with all sorts of new rules and opportunities; you need to know what those rules are”

21:18 “There are a few different risks here when it comes to retirement income. You have longevity risk; we are living a lot longer so you need to make that money last. You’ve got inflation risk…you want to make sure you have the proper risk allocation to the portfolio. You have sequence of returns risk”

26:51 “When you get to retirement, you have more control [over taxes] than ever because now you’re generating your own cash flow from your own assets, so you get to pick which assets you want to sell or generate income from to create that cash flow”

29:04 “What target date funds do is they help the average individual manage risk”

32:36 “Risk and expected return are related”