If you are an active member of the gig economy, you don’t need to wait for Congress to act to start saving for retirement. You can begin saving right now. And, depending on your specific situation, you may just be able to save faster than you think.
Investors
Economic concepts can lay dormant for extended periods of time, but they never truly disappear. This is why it pays to know people who are older than you and have actually lived through one (or more) economic cycles.
It’s in everyone’s best interest to be successful, so it’s part of a fiduciary’s duty to show them how.
Long-term investors like retirement savers can easily act like a fiduciary for their own assets. All they need to do is look in a mirror – but not for their own reflection. Look in a mirror a retirement professional is looking into and see how that reflection invests for retirement.
With a GOT-based strategy, expectations are predicated on needs, not the happenstance of the market. GOT-based portfolios may not have the record-breaking excitement of market indices, but it’s slow-and-steady-wins-the-race philosophy may lead to a more comfortable retirement.
In retirement planning, there can never be any guarantees. That’s why it’s critical that these tools are used continually and consistently. A magician never gives the audience’s eyes a chance to wander.
Never belittle the question or the person asking the question. These are sincere queries that represent commonly held beliefs. These beliefs live a Schrodinger Cat-like existence, being generally not quite true and not quite false. It’s critical, for the benefit of all retirement savers, that these questions be asked and that fiduciaries encourage their asking. This is the only way that allows the fiduciary to respond in the second noteworthy way: By using these questions to refute misconceptions and promote good retirement saving decision-making.
But, as the cliché goes, “What about the children?” Arguably, it is minor children who have the best (and easiest) opportunity to shield themselves from a retirement crisis. They have the advantage of time (to maximize the benefits of compound interest).
While Social Security is not going “bankrupt,” it’s clear it will have to change in both a fundamental and disruptive way.
In this retirement plan version of the game “Who Killed Cock Robin?” we can identify three macroeconomic trends that slayed the pension plan, once the giant among all retirement plans. But, where does the 401k fit in?
