Insurance for Your Retirement

If you are like me, it’s easy to get fed up with constantly paying insurance premiums. Writing a monthly check for car insurance alone will drive you crazy. Not to mention the direct withdrawals from your paycheck for health insurance and the hit to your mortgage for home owners insurance and you have a lot of money going out the window to pay for disasters that might not even happen.

But if those disasters do happen, you will be very glad you had insurance. But there is one big life event that is coming that you want to do all you can to prepare for financially and that is old age and retirement. While there is no “old age insurance”, you will find as you do your retirement planning that there are some very valuable insurance policies that are absolutely critical to a retirement life that is enjoyable, safe and prepared for.

We may or may not think of life insurance as part of retirement planning. After all, the benefits of life insurance, at least on the surface are for those who survive you after your death which doesn’t do you a lot of good when you are living and breathing. But you can invest in life insurance that also serves as a long term investment as well. These policies which are sometimes called “whole life” allow the funds you put in to be invested and to build a cash value that you can cash in on when you retire.

So you may want to carry $100,000 insurance when you are in the working world, paying a mortgage and trying to get the kids through college. But if you can then hit retirement, cash in on the investment value of that insurance and spend your golden years with just enough insurance to cover some protection for your spouse and funeral expenses, that is a better way to organize your insurance programs.

Another layer of insurance that a lot of people are taking advantage of is Medicare supplement insurance. Medicare is a great program that benefits a lot of people. But Medicare can only go so far. Those corny commercials for Medicare supplement insurance are goofy but they are on target that you need to have another safety net in the event you find yourself needing more extensive medical coverage than Medicare can provide. If you took the time to set up this kind of insurance early in your retirement planning, it will pay you big time when the need is there during your golden years.

A level of insurance that can be one of the biggest blessings if you become ill in your elderly years is in home health care insurance. Many times illnesses that you endure due to old age are not the kind of thing you would want to get through in an expensive hospital room. You will recover more quickly in your home but you still need someone to make sure you get your medications, take care of the little life details that you cannot tend to when you are poorly and be there if you take a turn for the worst.

This is where the care of an in home nursing service can be so valuable. This insurance can enable you to have care with you right in your home which will give you the care you need and take a lot of worry and work off of your family. And since all senior citizens need medical care at some point in their retirement life, in home health care insurance is a must.

By setting up these different specialized insurance policies early enough in your working life, you can get some value into them when the time comes for you to retire. Then you can you enter retirement with confidence knowing you have policies with reliable insurance providers to take care of the needs that you expect to come up during your golden years.
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Retirement Looks Different Through a Woman’s Eyes

The classic picture of a couple retiring and the wife cashing in on the great retirement planning of the husband is a pretty picture for sure but it doesn’t always line up very well with reality. For thousands of women, seeing the retirement years ahead mean you will be making plans for retiring yourself. But even if you have a husband, it’s a good idea to look at retirement with the idea of what if you have to face it alone. It’s a sad statistic but women outlive men in general. So if you get to retirement or just before it and you find yourself facing that next transition of life, retirement looks a lot different through a woman’s eyes than when a man does the same preparation.

Saving up for retirement is something that is at least as important if not more important for women as it is for men preparing for the same time of their lives. And since women typically earn somewhat less than men during their careers, sitting down and thinking through the formula of how much to set aside for retirement should be a carefully considered act and one that is repeated frequently over the years to make sure you are on track.

This is especially true if your work is not in the conventional world of big business. If you make a good living running your own antique shop or as an entrepreneur as many women do, you have to think about your retirement planning yourself because you will not have the advantages of a company sponsored 401k plan to cash in on. So as soon as you feel you know that the way you make your living is not gong to change, start your saving and investing immediately.

On the other side of that equation, it might be worth taking a look at getting into a corporate situation entirely for the insurance and the retirement benefits. While there is often a “glass ceiling” in the business world, if you know why you are there which is to build a strong retirement planning package, you can leverage your position in the business world shrewdly and not have the stresses that many men endure in that same setting.

Above all, make it your private passion to learn all you can about investments and ways you can build your retirement portfolio. With the advent of internet trading, often a woman can start with very little and with some careful investing and conservative stock purchases, build up an impressive portfolio that can serve as an excellent retirement vehicle down the road.

Just as you may have done if you spent your working years in a family situation, you should look at how your money is used not only for the immediate value but as an investment down the road. It is often convenient to live in an apartment or rental property because when you are a working woman, upkeep on a home is a nuisance. And if you don’t like mowing the lawn and all of the other overhead of a home, that purchase may not fit your lifestyle.

Nonetheless, home ownership is one of the smartest ways to go about building equity in advance of retirement. You might look at buying a house as a big step toward financial independence in your retirement years. The way the tax laws are structured, you will get a lot of financial value out of home ownership and it can serve as the basis for further financial planning once your ownership of the home is secured. So take a second look at home ownership in a house with a yard and all of the trappings. If the overhead is too much to take on, you can often bring in renters or roommates who may enjoy that aspect of living in a house and you can cut them some slack on the rent if they take care of upkeep of the place.

By beginning to plan early in life for retirement later, women can do just as well as men in preparing for this important part of life. But you have to face the responsibilities of retirement planning squarely and not procrastinate on starting your investment and retirement portfolios far enough ahead that they will pay off later. If you do, you too can enjoy a peaceful and prosperous retirement years. …Read more >>

Make a Plan and Make it Work

Being ready for retirement is not something that just happens. Every single person you see in retirement today that is enjoying a leisurely life in their golden years are where they are because they planned for it. The first question that may come to mind is when the right time to start planning for your retirement might be. The answer is that if you are asking the question, it’s the right time. You really cannot start planning too soon. If you could start putting money back for retirement as early as right out of high school, that would be just that much more time you have to build up a really comfortable retirement nest egg that will serve you well when you need it in your golden years.

But most of us start thinking about retirement in our adult years and usually in association with some big life event such as getting married or having a baby. So we have one word of advice if you have been thinking about beginning a retirement plan. That advice is stop thinking about it and take action. If you make the subject a focus for you and your spouse to look at, you both will be glad you got off the dime and got moving on a plan.

Often the trouble with making a retirement plan is you don’t know where to start. Too many people just wait for their employers to introduce a 401K plan and they just dump some money in there and count on Social Security to be there in a few decades. Then they call it a day and call that a retirement plan.

You and I both know that your security in your golden years is too important to not take more seriously than that. So set aside some time each week for both of you to sit down and start thinking about how to create a retirement fund and how to plan to build a retirement plan that you can grow into. The first step always begins with you.

If you don’t know where to start, then admit that and set about to do some reading to get ideas. You are doing that right now by reading this article. But get out there on the internet and find some of the great books out there on retirement planning and take some time and read them. You will start out ignorant and end up an expert in retirement planning.

Keep plenty of notes during the discussion and learning phases so you have a road map of ideas to build into a plan for building a retirement fund. Once you have a simple plan, its time to talk to a financial advisor. If you trust your bank, go talk to them and see what they can do for you. Or you can seek out a friend or someone in your community who you know will be able to steer you toward how to build a retirement fund that is structured properly to protect your retirement money from taxes and be there for you when you need it when you are old and grey.

Now it is time to kick it up to the next level. Once you have a plan and perhaps are seeing it start to take off, start learning about investments. There are lots of places you can see your retirement funds go that will give you a nice yield that can make that fund grow more quickly do to shrewd investing. You can divert money to real estate, the stock market, mutual funds or other well know investments. Diversify where you put your money so no one financial reversal can whip out your retirement funding.

Above all stay on top of your retirement fund and your retirement plan. Review it together frequently to see if your retirement goals are still the same and your investments and pans for building our retirement fund line up with that plan. By making retirement planning as big a part of your thinking as planning your family or your career, you will give it serious attention over the years. And the result will be a strong financial plan that will give you good resources to enjoy a happy and worry free retirement life. …Read more >>