A Quick Take On Social Security And Retirement Planning
Alicia Munnell, a frequent Marketwatch contributor and the director of Boston College’s Retirement Research Institute, had this quote in an article she published:
“If you delay taking Social Security from age 62 to age 70, your eventual monthly checks will be 76% bigger.”
That’s because of the compounding effect. For every year you hold off collecting your monthly benefits between 62 and 70, you get an 8% raise. So, for example, if you were due to collect $1450 per month at age 62 and you could wait until age 70 to start collecting a monthly check, you would receive $2560 per month instead - for the rest of your life, with cost of living increases for inflation. Collecting $1110 more per month is a great deal if you can hold off taking the benefit for that long. The problem for many of us is we can’t hold off because we need the income.
Don’t wait until retirement is around the corner to start figuring out that’s a problem for you. Start working on it now. And encourage younger people you know (yes, even people in their twenties, in fact, especially them) to start now too.
Thing Two
What Would You Do?
Here's a question for you:
If your best friend told you he was making lots of easy money trading options, what would you do?
The answer is, you should do what you want. But, if you do decide to start trading options, you should get some understanding of what that really means. And, hopefully, as a part of gaining that understanding, you’d come to the same conclusion that many people, including the ones at clarkfinancial.com, have:
“The number one reason why most options traders fail is they rely solely on market timing for success. If you’re using options simply as a leveraging tool to make more money on the predicted movement in a stock or index, you’ll have many trades go in your favor, and from time to time you’ll experience fantastic gains. However, if you’re simply buying calls or puts based on what you expect the underlying stock to do, your odds of long term success as an options trader are very limited.”
If you still want in knowing that, go ahead. But know there are other “options”.
Thing Three
Just A Thought
“If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.”―Marcus Aurelius
