Keen On Retirement

At Keen Wealth, we try to view these developments through a very wide lens and remind our clients that the long-term upward trajectory of our economy never follows a straight line. Today, I thought it might be useful to narrow our focus a little bit. Let’s look at how the rate of inflation affects your personal portfolio, as well as other factors that don’t necessarily make the headlines but can still impact your purchasing power in retirement.

Deciding when to start taking Social Security payments is one of the most important decisions you and your fiduciary advisor will make about your retirement plan. It’s also one of the trickiest to get right.

The headlines and talking heads painted a very bleak picture last week as the market went through its first significant bout of volatility in two years. But at Keen on Retirement I’m not trying to scare you into clicking on another link or sticking around through the next commercial break. We want to give folks our honest perspective on what’s really going on in the markets and the state of the economy’s fundamentals.

I’ve mentioned before how vital it is that retirees replace their old 9 to 5 routines with a schedule that keeps them active and engaged. More and more retirees – including some of my own clients – have started taking retirement gap years to help them do just that.

One of the best books I read last year was Marie Kondo’s “The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up.” Kondo is an organizational consultant who says her mission is to “organize the world and spark joy in people’s lives.” Her world-famous “KonMari Method™” teaches folks how to apply traditional Japanese simplicity values to decluttering, freeing us from stuff we’ve accumulated over the course of our lives that doesn’t really make us happy.

No, we can’t look back at 2017 and tell you definitively how the market is going to behave in 2018. But we can look for potential “rhymes,” the lessons of the past year and the trends that may echo into the next. In particular, I think there are four important takeaways from 2017 that you should keep in mind when discussing your 2018 financial plans with your fiduciary advisor: