Are you wondering whether or not you’ll be able to retire at age 67? If so, there’s an easy answer. All you have to do is go to a retirement calculator and enter your salary, details about any retirement accounts, the balances in your 401(k)s and information about your savings and how they are invested and the amount of your pay you intend to set aside each year over the course of the next 20 years.
The answer
After you enter those numbers, the calculator will quote the odds that your estimated savings, plus Social Security, will produce enough income to support you throughout your retirement years. If you’re fortunate, you’ll find that you’ll be able to retire at 67 and with something close to your current standard of living.
If you’re not as prepared as you should be
If you learn that you haven’t saved enough for a comfortable retirement, the most important thing you can do – and this won’t come as any surprise – is increase the percentage of you salary that you put away every year. You can use the retirement calculator to do some different situations with varying rates of saving. These will show you how much you need to increase your saving to improve the odds that you will be able to retire comfortably at 67.
What happens if the numbers don’t work out?
It’s possible that you’ll find the amount you can really expect to put away doesn’t match the savings level suggested by the retirement calculator. If this is the case, you’ll need to save as much as possible and then find ways to add to your savings effort with other tactics that could help you improve your prospects for a good retirement.
Number one on the list
At the top of the list is staying on the job for several more years. This would allow you to both fatten your savings and increase your Social Security check by as much as 25% or more. Here’s an example of what I mean. One study showed that if people stop working at age 66, only about 55% of them could retire comfortably. However, if they keep working until age 70, the percentage of households that can retire while still having the standard of living they enjoyed before retirement jumps to 86%.
Other ways to improve your outlook
Fortunately, there are a number of other things you can do to improve your retirement outlook. This ranges from getting a part-time job after you retire to pulling income out of your house with one of those reverse mortgages to moving to a city or town that has a lower cost-of-living. You might also be flexible about how you take money from your savings after you retire.
It’s all up to you
While these are some of the things that you could do in the future, your number one priority for now should be to give yourself a good retirement–readiness check-up as recommended in this article. You just can’t develop a plan that can improve your odds of retiring at age 67 unless you know where you stand today.
Getting rid of that debt
It is difficult to increase the amount of money you can save if you’re carrying a big load of debt. If this is the case, you need to get rid of the debt first because the interest you’re paying is all money you can’t save. You could choose to do this through a debt consolidation loan or a debt management plan. However, both these alternatives might require five years or longer to complete, which would be years you wouldn’t be able to save as much money as required. In comparison, our debt consolidation partners could help you get out of debt 24 to 48 months and with an affordable payment plan. We offer a 100% satisfaction guarantee so that you at any time you are unsatisfied with the plans your offered, you can walk away without paying a single cent.
