Avoidance Theory: How To Sidestep Certain Retirement Mistakes

No matter how much you try, you’ll never be perfect with your savings plan.

Especially when it comes to retirement.

Sure, you’ll save, have a budget, minimize debt and do everything you need to while you’re still working to make sure you’re smooth sailing into retirement, but the fine print often is overlooked, and you’re actually making some fairly common, albeit avoidable, mistakes as you head toward your Golden Years with the best intentions.

One of the more common retirement mistakes is just setting up your investment plan and forgetting about the types of investing and saving you’re doing.

You’ll undoubtedly struggle with being too aggressive with your investments or not doing too much, so the idea behind it is to find a compromise to make as much money as you can so long as you feel comfortable. Being overly aggressive not only puts you in an emotional roller coaster financially but often can lead to losses that you can’t recover from and investments that you’re never really that certain of or comfortable with overall.

Here’s one that is a real head-scratcher: retiring and assuming you’ll never need to worry about traditional income again.

This is just flat out misguided thinking.

Ask anyone who is up on the ins and outs of retiring the right way, and they’ll be quick to tell you that they have some job or part-time income lined up. This isn’t just to “keep busy” or to “stay sharp” or whatever other retirement cliches you’ve heard. This is more about not depending on your 401K or retirement account, pension or other income sources to be the sole means of surviving once you’ve stopped working full time.

If you’re still not keen on the idea of working after you retire, you should have that conversation with your financial planner or simply realign your savings plan to make sure it coincides and runs parallel with your retirement age.

Also, if retiring means you want to spend money traveling, you have to budget that cost into your plans, too. Anything you want to spend money on when you no longer have a steady income has to be part of your thinking.

Retiring is never an easy topic, although it can be rewarding if done right.

The real drawback is if you’re not inclined to invest properly and don’t have a propensity to save money while you’re still working. The combination of those two, plus not giving up on generating some income even after you’re done working is going to make the transition from the workforce to retirement that much easier.

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