Posts Tagged Estate Planning

Here are three additional ways people in their forties can maximize their retirement savings. Don’t skimp on your retirement savings to pay for your children’s college education. Why? Simple. You or your children can borrow money to pay for college, but you cannot borrow money to pay for retirement. In addition, when investing for retirement, time is indeed money. The more you can invest early on, the greater the likelihood that you’ll have more money when you retire. Also, working longer, say well into your sixties, may not be an option. Corporate downsizing and/or health problems could limit how long you can work. The fact is, saving more than you need for retirement will allow you to help pay off your children’s student loans when you do retire. Make the most of what your employer is offering. Your employer may well be offering more than a paycheck. For example, some

An article in Kiplinger discussed an aggressive approach to financial planning in your forties. Let’s take a look at some of the highlights. Make saving for retirement a priority and beef up your investments. You’ll want to start by making the largest possible contributions to your employer’s retirement plan. At the very least, you should put enough into your company’s retirement plan to take full advantage of its contribution matching program. A word of caution—if you put all your retirement savings into tax-deferred accounts, you might get hit hard by taxes when you retire. That’s because withdrawals from 401 (k) plans and traditional IRAs are taxed at the retiree’s ordinary income tax rate. This makes contributing to a Roth IRA a good idea. Your contributions are after-tax, but your withdrawals are tax-free as long as you are over 59½ and have owned the Roth IRA for five years or more.