Hello, Tony kins, you're here. Please forgive the sports metaphor. We're now approaching home plate and the end of the course. I have one last question for you before we put the exclamation point on successful retirement secrets. How much is enough is my attempt to bring it all together in your mind is a system to follow for years to come. At the end of this lesson, you should have a system in your head if not on paper that allows you to process every bit of information about retirement that comes your way.

By now you've learned all the fundamental steps necessary to build a roadmap to follow if you want a successful retirement. The context for this is your financial future, and a certain knowledge that in our society, more money is usually better than less money. You must also keep in mind as you ask this last question, there may be no single or best answer. But to even approach a good answer, you now have a much better understanding of what is involved in achieving the best financial future possible for you and your family members. The present now includes your participation in successful retirement secrets. That's been both a financial and a time commitment by you to explore this idea in great depth.

If you find yourself reading or watching this without a parallel involvement in SRS, that's okay, since it has relevance or anyone thinking about money, and retirement. If you haven't already, download the transcripts and video files so you can review them from time to time. My plan is for them to be there for as long as possible, with new stuff being added all the time. But you never know. How much is enough? is a hard question to answer.

Each of us will come up with a different answer or perhaps a whole series of answers. To some extent, the answer revolves around the issue of whether your pile of money came directly from your time and effort or did it come from somewhere else? Did you win the lottery? Or perhaps inherit a substantial sum from someone else? If you did, that's fine. But it doesn't answer the questions associated with how long that money will last.

It's also a question where the answer or answers may change along the way, a meaningful answer from you today will very likely be very different from the answers you come up with three to 10 years from now. And your answers will almost certainly be different from the answers I come up with for myself. The temptation is to simply blurt out a large number, and then hope it comes out in our favor. But as I've said repeatedly, hope is not an effective strategy when it comes to investing and accumulating money for retirement. Here I'm talking about all US mortals and what we need to do to pay our bills and live our lives. All of what we are and plan to become happens knowing that none of us has a contract with God to be here tomorrow, much less at some point in the future.

When a comfortable retirement is just around the corner. At that point, our ability to work and create wealth may be severely limited. So the objective is to have enough, which rounds back to the primary question How much is enough? Here are some of the variables to consider and what they mean. What do you consider enough money to get you through a year today? This is largely a function of your present standard of living, and your acceptance that your retirement is in the future.

That will be the third and final phase of your life. Or you may already be retired either by choice or not, and how much is enough is rearing its ugly head. An argument is often made about the rate at which money is withdrawn from retirement savings to support a desired standard of living and to pay bills. In a low interest world which is what we have today. withdrawing at a low interest rate implies money will last longer. The question that follows how much is enough is how long will you live?

Will you leave family members behind? How much is enough for them? If your grandparents lived into their 80s, or even into their 90s, it follows that you might also, if your plan with a realistic or not is to retire at age 60, then it follows you should have enough money saved to live another 30 years or more. Either that or have a way to generate new income. We discussed this at length in module one, but for you what exactly is retirement? For our purposes, it's when you turn off the work for money switch and turn on the money works for you switch?

How will you respond them to threats posed by existential risks? This is perhaps a psychological profile question about risks, some of which can be safely ignored and others that need to be dealt with. If you have insurance, and nothing bad happens, we've spent some money to give us peace of mind. But there are threats that fall into what I call the Lloyds of London category. They're unlikely but hugely disruptive. Some of us freak out and lose sleep over these unlikely threats, while others find it expedient to ignore them.

This is not to say either way is right or wrong, but how will you respond? In successful retirement secrets, we identified some of these threats, so you can categorize them and either deal with them or ignore them. The danger is realizing too late that one of these threats existed and you simply didn't prepare for it. Invariably, they come from an unexpected direction. Most people attempt to fill their retirement buckets using traditional investment options. These can be either before tax plans like an IRA or a 401k 403 B, or after tax plans.

At some point, you will reach into these buckets of money and withdraw what you need to survive and thrive. This in turn raises some more Questions like the next three? How much do you need from your portfolio each year? to figure this out, compare your total income, including social security and possible pension income to what you'll need to maintain your desired lifestyle. The difference is what you'll need to pull from savings both before tax and after tax. a rule of thumb will be an annual withdrawal of about 4%.

But that number could be too high depending upon how you invest your money. How does your portfolio need to be invested to support your withdrawal needs? On one hand, if you have plenty of money, you can probably afford to be more conservative with your investment approach. On the other hand, if you plan to live a long time, you may have to be more aggressive. The key is to find the right balance between what you need and what is prudent. How much risk can you live with.

If you're not comfortable with risk or taking it wouldn't be prudent. You may need to cut back on your desired lifestyle. Some of us take a different approach and build our wealth with real estate. Historically, the investment return on real estate exceeds the investment return of stocks and bonds. The reason is that real estate is less liquid. It's difficult to extract 4% annually.

If you're okay with that, however, and know what you're doing fine, but you should consider other sources to pay your core expenses. Social Security as a primary source of income for many people in retirement. At first glance, you get what you get with little opportunity to modify the outcome. And there are lots of variables that need to be thought out in advance. A simple way to describe the various options is that they result in two possible outcomes. You either get smaller checks for a longer period of time, or you get larger checks for a shorter period of time.

Now, when will you die? It's a real challenge to determine the best time to sign your application for Social Security benefits and live with the outcome. Since you don't know the answer, it may turn out great, or it may not. Another potential source of income are pensions, often called defined benefit pension plans. These plans are contracts between you and an employer that provide monthly retirement income to millions of Americans. They used to be very common, but they're less so now.

But they provide a monthly income for many of us. If you have a defined benefit pension, then you'll have questions to answer when you elect to take it. I hope as a result of this course, you have a much better idea how to provide answers when the time comes. For example, do you have a spouse? If so, how old is that spouse relative to you? Does it matter if the Pension Benefit stops when you die?

Or when your survivor needs some income? If you die first, what percentage of your benefit will flow to your spouse if there is a survivor benefit? Does it have cola or a cost of living adjustment. At this point, I should probably stop talking. My hope and expectation is that you will now have a better understanding of retirement, and a fundamental framework for building your roadmap to follow as you journey through life towards retirement. Keep asking yourself those eight questions.

Record your answers, and focus your time and energy on the answers that will best help you get where you want to be. Good luck with your quest. As your future unfolds. Be thankful you have the luxury of being able to explore and savor the journey. I'll do my best to respond if you reach out to me for insights and other help as you work your way forward. Thank you very much for joining me and becoming a member of successful retirement secrets.

Your being here has helped me as I continue my journey through an exciting life. My best wishes to all of you