Keen On Retirement

Today, a successful retirement requires much more purposeful planning that accounts for major generational changes in how we work and live. I believe that engineering a modern retirement blueprint starts with four essential building blocks: Health, Family, Purpose, and Comprehensive Financial Planning.

We expect Thanksgiving to be a little stressful, especially if we’re hosting. We plan on being exhausted, especially if travel and kids are involved. And we often mentally prepare for some tension, especially if the dinner conversation turns to politics.

It wasn’t long ago that retirement was an almost automatic decision. Once you turned 65, it was time to retire, start collecting your pension and Social Security, jump over to Medicare, and move down to Florida.

Now that the presidential election is nearly over, I hope that folks will start to focus a little bit more attention on their financial planning to-do lists as we close out 2020. I know it’s tempting to get caught up in speculating what Congress and the Federal Reserve will or won’t do with regards to the economy, the markets, and health care. But those are unknown variables right now that none of us can control.

One of my biggest personal challenges during Covid-19 has been caring for my mother. Working in visits around her health care schedule while also doing everything I can to ensure her safety has given me a real appreciation for just how hard it's been for seniors to get the care and compassion they need in the pandemic environment.

We know at the household level, if we engage in “deficit spending,” that bill will eventually come due and we have to pay it. But at the government level, there are a group of economists who have developed a framework for thinking about how government spending and taxation works.