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At Keen Wealth, we encourage our married clients to participate equally in the financial planning process. One spouse might be the primary breadwinner and the other might keep up the home and raise the kids. Or both spouses may have careers but one still handles all of the financial planning.
A generation or two ago, most folks retired just because they turned 65. Today’s retirement is a bit more complicated than that. Age is still an important factor, but your ability to connect your financial resources to your lifestyle goals is just as important. And that brings us to one of my favorite planning tools – Checklists!
Last week I tried to provide some calm perspective on the recent fluctuations in the markets. Again, in summary: the corrections we’re experiencing right now are perfectly normal, and not nearly as scary as some of the headlines would have you believe.
The US economy passed a major milestone this summer: the longest bull market in history. Starting with the bottom of the market in March of 2009 through August of 2018, the Dow Jones Industrial Average is up 290%, the S&P 500 is up 320%, and the Nasdaq is up 520%. 2018 has also seen more job growth, strong consumer sales and housing numbers, and Apple and Amazon hitting trillion-dollar valuations.
As much as we caution investors against making knee-jerk reactions to the news, your investments and your long-term planning don’t exist in a vacuum either. That’s why when I attend conferences like the Barron’s Top Independent Advisors Summit or the Schwab Impact Conference, I like to come back with a report that I think will be beneficial to my clients and listeners. It’s just another way that we at Keen Wealth try to give the folks we work with a comprehensive financial-planning experience.
Most of the clients that we work with at Keen Wealth are prudent, reasonable and disciplined with respect to their retirement resources. Every so often we will come across a soon-to-be retiree who thinks that when they gain access to their retirement nest egg, they can just stop working and crack open their accounts like they’ve just won the lottery. This occurs more often with folks who haven’t had to commit to a lifetime of saving, investing, and planning, but instead may have earned a lump sum on their pension, earned corporate profit sharing, or came into an inheritance. In s