Why Not To Use A Retirement Calculator

Amid our fast-paced, technology-driven culture, we’ve seen a meteoric rise of online “retirement calculators”. You can find these on the websites of many 401k providers, investment firms, insurance companies, and quite possibly on your own company intranet. One quick Google search for “retirement calculator” just provided us with 367,000,000 results! While these tools attempt to give you a quick answer to the question of “Will I have enough money to retire?”, our team believes that you may be asking the wrong question.

Ask yourself more thought-provoking and subjective questions that aim at the heart of the matter:

• What do I want life to look like during retirement?
• What do I want to leave to my beneficiaries?
• How charitable do I want to be in retirement?
• Am I willing to alter my current lifestyle and saving habits in order to achieve success throughout retirement?
• What do I think tax rates will look like in the future?
• What will Social Security look like?
• Should I think about my family’s health history?
• What is my investment risk tolerance?
• Are my spouse and I on the same page?

And the list goes on!

Hopefully, you can appreciate that retirement planning is not as simplistic as spending 3 minutes on an internet tool that doesn’t understand complex human emotions and unique needs. You should be willing to dig a little deeper, be disciplined, and surround yourself with the right team of financial professionals that can help you define and constantly monitor your strategy. Only then will you be on the path to discovering what it is that is most valuable to you!