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Part 3: Retirement Planning Thumbnail

Part 3: Retirement Planning

Retirement planning means different things to different people. We all have different ideas of what life should look like after closing the chapter of our careers. However, even with countless unique perspectives, there is one statement that has applied to every person I have ever worked with: “At some point I do not want to HAVE to work or HAVE to save money.”

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Fun with Facts & Numbers Thumbnail

Fun with Facts & Numbers

Life expectancy in 1900 was 47. In 1935 (when the Social Security program became an active policy), life expectancy had increased to 61. The Social Security full retirement age (FRA) at that time was 65, meaning that over 50% of Americans were never intended to receive any sort of retirement benefit from the Social Security program. Life expectancy is up to 78.7 as of 2017. (source: U.S. Census Bureau).

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Knowing the Data Thumbnail

Knowing the Data

My wife and I generally agree about money. We both want to give generously to our church and other charities, we both want to save at least 15% of our income toward retirement, and we both want to have our mortgage paid off in less than 9 years (which will have been less than 15 years from when we bought our home together).

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Are Healthcare Costs a Retirement Killer? Thumbnail

Are Healthcare Costs a Retirement Killer?

One of our primary goals at The Wealth Group is to help our clients achieve financial independence at a younger age than most Americans. Financial independence doesn’t necessarily mean you retire and quit working; it just means you no longer need to keep working or saving money for the rest of your life. But for our clients in their 50s and early 60s that begin to contemplate retirement, one of their biggest concerns is healthcare costs. Before going on Medicare, buying private health insurance is certainly expensive.

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Scary Headlines Thumbnail

Scary Headlines

It’s silly to quote long-term spending figures as a lump sum. When you take a significant annual household expense and turn it into a 30-year cumulative lump sum dollar amount, of course it’s going to be a large number. The same could be said of food, transportation, housing, etc.

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Helping Our Clients Save More for Retirement Thumbnail

Helping Our Clients Save More for Retirement

The Wealth Group exists to help our clients make better decisions with their money. Our clients' financial behaviors should look different from their neighbors. Making better decisions around money leads to greater success with money; ergo, wealth is built. Building wealth is not magic; it's not the result of cosmic forces. It's a known formula, consistently followed over a long period of time. Every year since 2000, Vanguard releases a report called How America Saves. The 2016 report was released last summer; it is 110 pages and chock-full of fascinating data. Well, fascinating to nerds like us.

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The Importance of Car-Buying Decisions Thumbnail

The Importance of Car-Buying Decisions

Some blog posts are more important than others. If I could shout through the screen to you, I would say: “This post is really important!” It’s not important in the sense that “Mike and Austin think this is important”; it’s important because the math shows us it’s crucial. The second-largest annual expenditure for Americans is transportation (second to housing). If it’s the second-largest annual expenditure, it’s appropriate to say this category of spending should be a big deal in the world of financial planning.

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How Much Do I Need to Save to Get to My "Number?" Thumbnail

How Much Do I Need to Save to Get to My "Number?"

On any given day, you can turn on your television and see a variety of commercials that ultimately ask you, “What is your NUMBER?” The commercials are referencing the number you need saved for retirement, or financial freedom, or some other finishing point. To arrive at that is actually quite a complex set of formulas, Monte Carlo simulations and a whole bunch of assumptions about what you want your future life to look like.

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