In the past few years, the value of U.S. retirement plans have lost almost 2 trillion dollars. So, if you are betting on your 401 b retirement plan and/or alternative retirement plan to support you throughout your retirement years, you should start to pay attention to your retirement plan statements.
Most investors, after they’ve chosen the initial investments for their retirement portfolio, rarely take another look at it. If you want to have the best chance of your retirement portfolio supporting you once you retire, you have to manage it.
The first task that you have to tackle as you start to manage your portfolio, is to assess its current value. In many cases you will discover that the investments that you originally opened your accounts with are no longer the ideal assets that they seemed when you chose them. The [calculations
When you have calculated the present value of your portfolio, depending on how long you have until retirement, you may have to re-assess your retirement options.
In the best case scenario, your portfolio has over performed your income assumptions and you don’t have to change your retirement plans. If, however, like most people, your portfolio has under-performed your income projections, you have some hard decisions to make.
Your choices generally fall into one of three options. You can either choose to increase the monies that you are putting into your account to bring it up to what you’ve projected its value to be at this point. Or you can downsize your expected retirement lifestyle to match your portfolio’s new projected future value based on it’s value today.
The last and final choice you have, is to delay your retirement for a few years to build up your retirement nest or, alternatively, to plan on working part time once you do retire, to avoid lessening your standard of living.
For more information regarding 401k rollover benefits and other retirement options visit Eric’s site.
