How Much Cash Do I Have to Retire?

Read books on the subject; attend seminars; browse the internet: do everything and anything you can do to help you build financial wisdom and confidence.

--A conservative approach is best: Too many retirees still found themselves relying on high risk markets when the Great Recession hit because they didn't amass enough wealth during their working lives to cover their retirements. If you start planning for retirement young, and commit yourself to putting a modest portion of your income into a conservative fund (like a Roth IRA) every time you get paid, you'll be just fine. For example, if you put just 100 dollars a month into an IRA you will have earned over one and a half million dollars by the time you retire after 40 years.

--Get wealth management help you can trust: Once you have built up a comfortable nest egg in your emergency and savings accounts, you can start thinking about real investing. Getting help from a good financial planner can help you reach your retirement goals faster and more securely: after all, he is the expert!

Starting young and being wise in your choice of wealth management professionals can help you live your life today without worrying as much about what will happen tomorrow. Don't wait!

Okay, you are one of the lucky ones, making a killing in real estate and the stock market, or you have scrimped and saved so some day you hope to have a big enough nest egg to retire. Congratulations! You've done it. Now what?

Financial planning has historically focused on helping people achieve major financial goals such as saving and investing in order to retire comfortably, sending kids to college or buying that private island in the south pacific.

But what about retirees, who, for the most part, have already achieved their goals and simply want to preserve their way of life? Life changes when you are living your goals rather than aspiring toward them. Suddenly, you have more to lose than to gain and you want to know how to keep what you have. Building and generating wealth is no longer the most important thing in this stage of life, but preservation of wealth is vital. With more Americans approaching this phase of life, the issue of how to manage money within retirement is increasingly becoming a priority.

Consider these statistics:

The largest growing population segment in our country is people 100 years or older.

Within the next decade, most of the boomers will reach traditional retirement age. About 25% of the U.S. population--one in four people--will be retired.

Many of us will spend more years in retirement than we did working.

Yet when you search on the internet for retirement help, you'll find page after page almost exclusively focused on making money and building wealth for retirement rather than managing wealth in retirement. No one seems to be educating retirees about managing their income and developing the right distribution strategies. Estate planning is well covered--probably because it's a "goal" to provide money to heirs. But helping retirees to manage the money they have today, while they are still in retirement, is conspicuously absent in most financial education efforts.