What is Retirement Planning?
Retirement planning is, to put it simply, making a plan for your life when you stop working. A comprehensive retirement strategy will take into account not only financial preparation but also crucial lifestyle decisions, including when to retire, where to live, and possibly starting a second career. Everybody’s perception of this varies. It can entail downsizing, traveling, making a significant move, or moving in with relatives. Whatever that means, getting there will require some planning.
You must first determine your retirement goals before you can start financially preparing for retirement. Only after that can you evaluate where you are now and what needs to be done to accomplish those goals. Identification of potential income sources, such as Social Security and pensions, estimation of expenses, asset management, and implementation of a savings or investment strategy, are all important components of financial planning for retirement.
What is Financial Planning?
Retirement planning is older than financial planning. Financial planning, which is your present strategic plan based on your money with a paycheck, is something that is in the present, but retirement planning is something that is in the future. It concerns how you manage your finances, given your existing income. It entails using the money you already have to make wise investments in order to safeguard a bright financial future.
Without a sound current financial plan, it is impossible to have a healthy retirement strategy, and a decent financial plan will always contain a retirement strategy. A complete process of creating a financial plan involves allocating resources, evaluating risks, making investments, and formulating a strategy for addressing future needs.
Retirement Planning vs. Financial Planning: The Difference
Retirement planning is quite similar to financial planning. On your financial planning timeline, it is the last stop. The two frequently go hand in hand. You are saving money for retirement at the same time that you are saving for your mortgage payments.
Their commonalities cease here, though, and their variances start. Let’s dissect the following three crucial characteristics when differentiating retirement planning from financial planning elements.
- With or Without Income
A financial plan is explicitly predicated on the premise that the person creating it is currently producing income and will do so for the duration of the plan. In actuality, your financial strategy is frequently based on your predicted and actual revenue. It is what propels everything forward.
However, it’s likely that your income will decrease once you retire. After all, retirement is defined by this. In order to enjoy the rewards of many years of laborious effort for the rest of your life, you retire from your job. You can continue to work at a job you like, but your source of income will likely shift significantly as much of your existing revenue won’t be available to you.
A general financial planner might be excellent at distributing your current income, but he or she might or might not have insufficient in-depth knowledge to address inquiries that are particularly pertinent to the period of time after you stop receiving that money.
- Certain Point in Time
Financial plans are reasonably simple and have some degree of certainty. You are aware that if you make timely, complete mortgage payments each month, eventually, your mortgage debt will be zero. The same holds true for your credit card debt and car payments.
Retirement lacks the same level of assurance. Of course, you may calculate how much money you need to save each month to have a particular level of wealth by the time you retire, but a number of uncontrollable outside circumstances could quickly alter that plan. The stock market can decline. Benefits from Social Security could be cut by the government. Costs for medical treatment could rise. When helping you develop your plan, a qualified retirement planner must be able to take these frequently uncontrollable elements into account. Retirement planning is more concerned with planning for the future than financial planning is with creating a plan for you and your family today.
- Reducing Debt and Building Assets
The balance sheet is where the third significant distinction between financial planning and retirement planning exists. Your personal balance statement has assets on one side and obligations on the other, just like any other income statement. Putting money aside to pay off debt and lower interest costs is a major component of financial planning. It concentrates on the balance sheet’s liability section.
On the other hand, saving money for retirement is mostly about doing it in order to boost your assets and interest income. Building your assets includes working on expanding your investment portfolio. A retirement planner’s goal will be to help you increase your assets, while a financial planner may be helpful at helping you reduce debt.
Retirement Planning vs. Financial Planning: The Approach
Although the two concepts are distinct from one another and shouldn’t be used interchangeably, they are nonetheless intimately related in that one cannot be accomplished without the other. To keep your long-term retirement goals in line, your financial plan, which includes spending, budgeting, and investing today, must be on track. As a result, neither is more crucial than the other. Both are crucial components of a safe financial strategy, and they are both equally necessary.
A fiduciary financial advisor can assist you in better comprehending the distinctions between the two and can carry out a financial examination that will enable you to see where you stand financially and in terms of your retirement strategy right now. Fiduciary financial consultants, reliable partners in both financial planning and retirement planning, can help you understand financial strategies to support both short- and long-term aspirations. They may assist you in developing a budget that maximizes contributions to your future while being prudent with your current expenditures. They can also help keep you on track and walk you through investing possibilities.
Retirement Planning vs. Financial Planning: List of Tools
Here are a few of the best retirement planning and financial planning tools
1. Personal Capital
2. Betterment App
3. Vanguard
4. New Retirement
5. Fidelity Retirement
6. WalletBurst
7. Bankrate
Retirement Planning vs. Financial Planning: Understanding Your Fund Corpus
Retirement planning, in its most basic form, is the process of preparing for life after paid employment. This applies to all facets of life, not just the financial one.
The non-financial factors include lifestyle decisions like where to live, whether to stop working completely and how to spend time in retirement, among other things. All these factors are taken into account while planning for retirement holistically. At various phases of life, one’s focus on retirement planning changes. For instance:
- Retirement planning is laying away enough money for retirement early in a person’s working career.
- It could also entail setting precise income or asset goals and working toward them in the middle of your career.
- When you reach retirement age, you move from the phase of wealth accumulation to the phase of asset distribution. Your contributions to your retirement account have stopped. Instead, your years of saving start to pay off.
To maintain and improve your long-term financial health, you must plan your finances. Planning your finances can allow you to
- Feel more in charge of your finances and assured about your decisions.
- Create a plan for accomplishing your financial goals and set reasonable goals.
- Establish sound financial practices, such as regular savings and avoiding excessive debt.
- Recognize the value of investing and how it contributes to wealth creation.
Understanding the time value of money, or the idea that money today is valued more than the same amount tomorrow, is another crucial component of financial planning. According to this idea, investing is the only method to make money increase. If you don’t invest, you risk losing future purchasing power due to inflation as well as missing out on growth.