Factors Affecting Your Retirement Goals

To start on retirement planning, the following considerations will need to be addressed:

• setting retirement goals
• determining the size of your retirement nest egg
• how to fund the shortfall
• addressing insurance and other healthcare issues

Setting retirement goals is important because they give a general direction to retirement planning. The type of lifestyle that you want, for example, the type of travelling to embark on or whether to buy a retirement home are all examples of retirement goals that you may want to achieve. Once that has been identified, the next tasks is to determine how much resource will be required to live out the kind of retirement lifestyle that you want. Next, a savings and investment program will have to be formulated. This involves a systematic savings scheme and designing an investment program that will most suitably meet your retirement requirements. 

There are all sorts of retirement goals - doing more fishing, playing more golf, more travelling, or pursuing some hobby are some examples. Sufficient funds must be available for you to realise these goals. Needless to say, many factors affect your ability to accumulate the needed funds. External factors like changes in the economic environment and unexpected illnesses are not within your control. The best you can do is to develop strategies to lessen the negative effects they may have, and that is what planning is mostly about.

Among the factors you have a choice over, the age at which you want to stop working and the kind of lifestyle you want prior to that are two important ones that will have a strong impact on your retirement goals.