Managing Your Portfolio For Retirement

In the past few years, the value of U.S. retirement plans have lost almost 2 trillion dollars. So, if you are betting on your 403 b retirement plans and/or alternative retirement plan to support you throughout your retirement years, you should start to pay attention to your retirement plan statements.

Most investors, after they’ve chosen the initial investments, rarely look at their portfolio again. To have the best chance of actually having a retirement portfolio that will support you once you retire, you have to manage it.

The first task that you have to tackle as you start to manage your portfolio, is to assess its current value. In many cases you will discover that the investments that you originally opened your accounts with are no longer the ideal assets that they seemed when you chose them. The [calculations

Once you’ve computed your portfolio’s current value, depending on how long you have until retirement, you may have to re-assess your retirement options.

If you’re fortunate, your portfolio will have out-performed your income projections. In this case, you won’t have to modify your retirement plans much, if at all. If, however, you are like most people, your portfolio has seriously under-performed your original income projections. In this case, you have a few tough decisions to make.

Typically, the choices you have will fall into one of three options. 1) You can decide to step-up the amount of money that you are currently amassing into your account in order to bring it up to the amount that you’ve projected its value to be at this point. 2) You can lower your expectations of the retirement lifestyle that you had imagined to match your portfolio’s new projected future value based on it’s value today.

The last and final choice you have, is to delay your retirement for a few years to build up your retirement nest or, alternatively, to plan on working part time when you finally retire, in order to avoid having to drop your standard of living.

For more information on senior retirement communities and other retirement options visit Eric’s website.