What Happens If You Fumble In Retirement?

I remember when I was a junior in high school and playing in the big homecoming football game. The stands were packed and as we entered the fourth quarter I went back to receive a punt. Back then, I was a sure-handed player with good speed and aspirations to play at the next level. However, none of that mattered when the punt slipped through my hands, bounced between my legs, and slowly rolled end-over-end, out of my reach as I was sandwiched by two opposing players running full speed.

It was physically painful and emotionally disheartening because the game was on the line and the other team just recovered the ball on our 20 yard line. As I pulled myself up, I had to make the 25 yard jaunt back to the sidelines. As you might expect, it seemed like a journey of a thousand miles that had nothing but bad news and angry sentiments waiting for me.

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Damian Sylvia

Retirement Income Solutions

220 Monmouth Road

Oakhurst NJ 07755

 

Divorcing Women: How Much Do You Know About Your Husband's Retirement?

Achieving a secure retirement should be a primary financial goal for all adults. Ideally, married couples work as a team to plan for their retirement, invest and save according to strategies they discuss openly with each other and their financial and tax advisors, and check in on a regular basis to make adjustments as needed.

In the real world, though, things often work quite differently –and not nearly as well.

Fidelity Investments recently published the 2015 edition of its online biennial Couples Study, analyzing the retirement and financial expectations and preparedness of 1,051 committed couples (at least 25 years old, and with a minimum annual household income of $75,000 or at least $100,000 in investible assets).

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Damian Sylvia

Retirement Income Solutions

220 Monmouth Road

Oakhurst, NJ 07755

Have a plan when tailoring retirement draws to your income

Are you financially prepared for a 20-year retirement? How about replacing your income over a 30- or 40-year retirement?

The Social Security Administration estimates that the average 65-year-old woman today will live to age 86 and a 65-year-old man today will live to age 84. Also according to Social Security Administration projections, about 25% of today's 65-year-olds will live past 90, with approximately 10% living to be older than 95.

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Damian Sylvia

Retirement Income Solutions

220 Monmouth Road

Oakhurst, NJ 07755

Americans Left $24 Billion in Retirement Money on the Table Last Year

The average worker is missing out on more than $1,300 a year. Make sure to get your share.

Personal savings rose last year, as conscientious workers reined in their spending. But a smaller portion of those savings were stashed in employer-sponsored retirement plans, new research shows. This and other recent findings suggest that the much-vaunted 401(k) match may not be the silver bullet for retirement savings that is widely presumed.

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Damian Sylvia

Retirement Income Solutions

220 Monmouth Road

Oakhurst, NJ 07755 

Your Retirement Checklist for Every Age

It's never too late—or too early—to start planning for your eventual retirement. The Adventist HealthCare Retirement Plan, along with human capital and management consulting services provider Hewitt Associates, has compiled a list of retirement strategy steps people should take in each decade of adulthood, from their 20s to their 60s.

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Damian J. Sylvia

Retirement Income Solutions

220 Monmouth Road

Oakhurst, NJ 07755 

3 Retirement Problems and Solutions That Millennials Face Today

It's no secret that millennials have had a tough time getting started with careers, families and saving for retirement.

Everything from the Great Recession, to the rising cost of higher education, to the increasing scarcity of better-paying jobs has taken its toll on people born in the last two decades of the 20th century.

And while retirement may be three to four decades away for even the oldest of this bunch, there are some very real problems that they will face if they don't take action soon. Let's look at three:

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Damian J. Sylvia

Retirement Income Solutions

220 Monmouth Road

Oakhurst, NJ 07755

5 Best Tips to Save $1 Million for Retirement

Everyone knows that they need to save for retirement especially with company pensions becoming extinct over the next generation. At some point, you’re going to stop working and will have to live on whatever you have saved plus what you’re entitled to receive from Social Security.

Having worked with many people who have saved $1 million or more, there are patterns of behavior that they all possess that have helped them to accumulate their wealth. While there’s no denying that it helps to start with a well-paying job, earning more money is no guarantee that you’ll be set for retirement. If you want to have $1 million or more saved for retirement, here are 5 tips to help you join the millionaire retiree ranks.

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Pensions Are Taking the Long, Lonely Road to Retirement

Pensions were once just as much a given in the full-time working world as rock-solid health insurance and gold watches on retirement day. Remember that time? Touch-tone phones were still all the rage, too.

But in the 21st century, many employers have already made the call to eliminate pensions, with more joining their ranks every day. Thus that once-secure source of retirement income could quickly become a relic, although other instruments – such as 401(k) accounts and certain annuities – have since replaced pieces of the pension puzzle.

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Damian Sylvia

Retirement Income Solutions

220 Monmouth Road

Oakhurst, NJ 07755

Retirement Planner: An active, healthy lifestyle is a wise investment

In 1966, I was accepted by the University of Vermont medical school at about the same time Bernie Sanders was arriving in the state. Medical school appealed to me in part because I was a hypochondriac, but I had also paid my dues as an undergraduate having to endure tough courses like organic chemistry, and I couldn't bear to have that ordeal go to waste. As it turned out, I decided to go to the UC Berkeley Haas School of Business instead, so here I am. Be thankful that I'm your retirement planner and not your physician. But as your planner, I can't emphasize enough the importance of good health as a primary ingredient of a successful retirement. It's more important than money.

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Damian J. Sylvia

Retirement Income Solutions

220 Monmouth Road

Oakhurst, NJ 07755

How Your Retirement Account Balance Compares to Your Peers

Your age often dictates your retirement saving priorities. In your 20s and 30s, you need to get some money into a retirement account so that it can start growing on your behalf. Once you have accumulated a significant nest egg, it becomes increasingly important to protect what you've got. And after you retire, you need to sensibly draw down your assets so that your nest egg lasts the rest of your life. Here are some strategies to give your retirement finances a boost at each stage of your life.

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Damian Sylvia

Retirement Income Solutions

220 Oakhurst, NJ 07755 

Pay Off All my Debt With My Retirement Money?

Dear Liz, My wife and I no longer work. She is 57 and I am 55. We have retirement income of about $90,000 in military and Department of Defense pensions. We have several Roth IRAs and some mutual funds. I have a 403(b) with $75,000. Is it wise to tap retirement accounts to clear off a credit card and pay my car off early to get out of debt? I owe $17,000 on it at 4.2% interest. -- Jeff

Dear Jeff, It rarely makes sense to prematurely tap a retirement account to pay off debt. It usually is much better to use savings or cash in nonretirement assets.

Withdrawals from your 403(b) retirement plan would trigger income taxes that would eat up at least a quarter of what you pulled out. While you wouldn't be subject to the 10% federal penalty because you are 55 and separated from your employer, you'd still wind up paying income taxes equal to your federal and state tax brackets. If you were in the 25% federal bracket, for example, a $20,000 withdrawal would trigger at least $5,000 in income tax (plus whatever your state charges).

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Damian Sylvia

Retirement Income Solutions

Retirement advice from a Boomer to a Millennial

I'm in my early 60s and fortunately will be able to retire soon. But I work with a lot of young people who just don't get how important it is start planning early for retirement. They don't even seem to know where to start. I'd like to help them better prepare -- do you have any advice? --Jeff M.

I applaud you for wanting to help your colleagues in their 20s and early 30s, but let's not be too quick to assume they're clueless about retirement. The latest Allstate/National Journal Heartland Monitor Poll did find that young workers are more concerned with immediate needs like paying off student debt and building an emergency fund than retirement. But a new T. Rowe Price study also reports that saving for retirement is important to Millennials and that they're actually doing a pretty good job of balancing current obligations with preparing for retirement.

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Damian J. Sylvia

Retirement Income Solutions

220 Monmouth Road

Oakhurst, NJ 07755

3 Retirement Loopholes That Are Likely to Close

The government has a knack for catching on to the most popular loopholes.

There are plenty of tips and tricks to maximizing your retirement benefits, and more than a few are considered “loopholes” that taxpayers have been able to use to circumvent the letter of the law in order to pay less to the government.

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Damian J. Sylvia

Retirement Income Solutions

220 Monmouth Road

Oakhurst, NJ 07755

What's Wrong With Our Retirement System And What We Can Do About It

What’s wrong? As the Baby Boom moves into retirement, confidence in our retirement system is waning, for good reason. Plan sponsors, including public and private employers, are rapidly freezing their defined benefit plans—those that promise a guaranteed level of income in retirement—by closing the plans to new hires or stopping current employees from earning additional benefits.

When legally permitted to do so, some plan sponsors are even cutting back benefits employees have already earned. Municipal pension cutbacks growing out of the Detroit bankruptcy offer one recent example where previously earned benefits already have been cut. Congress provided another example late last year when it authorized severely underfunded multiemployer pension plans to reduce previously earned benefits of collectively-bargained employees. Meanwhile, Washington is awash in proposals to cut back, tax away, or means test Social Security old-age benefits whenever a political opening makes that feasible.

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Damian Sylvia

Retirement Income Solutions

220 Monmouth Road

Oakhurst, NJ 07755 

Stop your grown kids from ruining your retirement

If you are in your 50s or 60s and are still caring for your kids financially, you really need to start caring for yourself—or you may never be able to afford to retire.

A recent study found more than half of parents who are supporting adult children are "extremely concerned" about saving enough for retirement.

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Damian J. Sylvia

Retirement Income Solutions

220 Monmouth Road

Oakhurst, NJ

07755 

Tontines: The retirement plan of the future?

Question: What is a tontine? How do tontines work? And, what’s the financial and economic thinking behind them?

Milevsky: A tontine can be thought of as an arrangement with some friends to purchase a very long-dated bond. You agree to split the coupons as they get paid, but (and this is the key) if one of the friends dies, the coupons get split among the survivors. So, people that live a long time end up getting (very) large coupons, at the expense of those who died earlier. The financial economic idea here is that it allows investors to earn mortality credits without requiring an insurance company to guarantee anything.

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Damian Sylvia

Retirement Income Solutions

220 Monmouth Road

Oakhurst, NJ 07755

5 reasons the retirement crisis is worse for women than men

It often seems that nearly every day, there's a new report telling ushow woefully unprepared Americans are for retirement.

But dig a little deeper into the myriad studies, and another trend emerges: While both men and women lack retirement savings, the picture for women is far bleaker. The gap starts to develop early: A recent T. Rowe Price study of millennial workers found that women were less likely to put money into a 401(k), and those who did had smaller balances than men.

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Damian J. Sylvia

Managing Partner

Retirement Income Solutions