A Retirement Project?
We each make sense of money in our own way, and with our own distinct bias. We have varying PC skills. Our ages differ. What we have each done so far differs. And what we're each worth today differs.
Those gaps make it hard to write something worthwhile for each of us on the subject of
retirement financing, so I opted for a simple approach, spread over three weeks.
In this segment of my site, I take a look at the holes in retirement planning. I have done my best to make this very simple, and left out the complex stuff. If you find it too simple,
yell.
In 1992, when I closed my firm, there was no quality knowledge or support for a small business owner in trouble. I spent a few years (this was before the Internet) talking to hundreds of folk about what was happening to me, and what they were doing to prevent the same disaster hurting them. Each of them had a single idea or two, but very few had a strategy. These ideas were the seeds of what eventually became the
Crashproof your Business strategies.
It seems that the retirement process has much the same dearth of unbiased information, or advisors without vested interests. The industry structure has grown in a way that makes it almost impossible for an advisor to survive on consulting fees without getting income from product sales as well. This means that the more we know about how money works, how the myriad calcs are done, and what questions we should ask, the more likely we are to
get the results we want.I don’t think any advisor
worth his/her salt will have a problem dealing with the questions a little bit of knowledge is going to inspire. But this issue is far too important to be handled without understanding exactly how your money is working towards your old age.
On that note, it’s time for bed. I hope you enjoy playing with the calculators, and leave with a better understanding of how simple it all is. And please don’t forget to sign up for Petes Weekly - a weekly email aimed at South Africans everywhere who are in their own business, who want to be in their own business, have a spouse in their own business, or who just wanting a cracking good read each week. (He he he, I could not resist that!)