Three Steps to a Financially Secure Retirement

If you want your golden years to be, well, golden, the Financial Services Institute Inc. recommends these three steps: Start saving in your 20s, save regularly, and use an investment advisor to help you to set goals and guide you. Obviously, due to the power of compounded interest, getting an early jump on saving for retirement is beneficial. Also, from a behavioral standpoint, the sooner you can establish saving regularly as a solid habit, the better off you will be down the road. And, of course, the expert advice of an advisor, one who is bound by a fiduciary duty to look out for your best interests, can help you stay on track and avoid major pitfalls.

The Financial Services Institute issued its unsurprising findings to kick off National Retirement Planning Week, an education program sponsored by the National Retirement Coalition, an organization comprising 17 retirement savings organizations and trade groups.

The fact that, in the last decade, investors have been harmed by market factors well beyond their control underscores the benefits of working with an advisor. During our recent tumultuous markets, we have helped our clients not to panic and to focus on tempering downside risk while remaining in position to benefit from the market’s eventual upturn.

Yet, wealth accumulation is just part of the retirement planning puzzle. Increasingly, Boomers will need expert guidance with retirement wealth distribution. That is, retirees will need an advisor’s expert guidance on issues from tax-efficient ways to make required distributions from retirement accounts to when and how to claim Social Security benefits. And these answers are far more complex than just building a retirement nest egg. So, if you are closing in on retirement or already retired and you do not work with a financial advisor, you can still get plenty of value from the relationship.