How Much is Enough in Retirement?
By John McNicholas
Published on: November 7, 2020
When we sit down to carry out retirement planning with a client, one of the questions we end up tossing around a lot is, “How much is enough in retirement?” This usually provokes some interesting and good fun discussions, particularly when a husband or wife with a different perspective is present too!
However, it’s also a really important discussion, as we simply don’t support the idea of saving for saving’s sake, and blindly building up a pot of money with no objective in mind. Instead we ground the discussion around real goals and now introduce to you four concepts that should be top of mind for investors planning their retirement.
The Four Concepts
- Personal security – the minimum level of income acceptable to you to meet your basic needs.
- Lifestyle security – the desired level of income you would like in order to maintain your quality of lifestyle i.e. the cars you drive, where you live, how many holidays you take each year and if you turn left when boarding a long-distance flight rather than turning right.
- Turning success into significance – your potential desire to use your wealth to make a meaningful difference either through a legacy to your family or through philanthropy and charitable bequests.
- Aspirational wealth – a desire on the part of some to continue to accumulate wealth rather than focus on wealth preservation in retirement.
We believe that these concepts are more meaningful to investors than the typical financial services industry jargon. They allow us to ensure that those approaching retirement can ensure that their preferences can be matched to an appropriate financial planning solution unique to them.
We prepared a detailed guide to help investors in Ireland to prepare for retirement. In this guide, we cover each of these concepts in more detail with the aim of helping you to identify realistic, achievable and rewarding goals for yourself when you retire. We help you draw the picture of what retirement will look like… and then we help you to colour it in with the right plan in place.
We help retirees identify the life they want to live in retirement and then develop a plan to help you achieve that life. We focus on how you want to live in retirement and the quality of that life, not just on the size of your pension pot.
