Archives

If you could prevent a 43% loss per year, every year, for the next 20…

Retirement is about more than just paying your bills.

Estate planning is an absolute must. I don’t care how much money you have or don’t have.

Take the case of the recently deceased actor Philip Seymour Hoffman. He died of a drug overdose this year and, although he wasn’t retired at the time, the financial disaster he set up by not consulting a qualified person to help his heirs in the event of his death will cost his partner $12 million in estate taxes.

What exactly does it take to retire? Once you get there, what are the biggest challenges retirees face? How should your money be spread out?

Bond Strategist Steve McDonald talks to two Oxford Club Members about the issues retirees face today.

Increase your annual return by just 1% over 40 years and you get a 30% raise in retirement. I’ll take that any day!

But, not many of us have 40 years left… I know I don’t. So why mention it here in Wealthy Retirement?

Because almost all of us have 20, 25 to 30 years to go and that’s more than enough time to make a huge difference in our retirement income… if we make a few minor adjustments now.

Thirty-six percent of Americans surveyed say they have less than $1,000 saved for retirement. Sixty percent have less than $25,000 put away.

That means the rest of us will be supporting a lot of people at just above the poverty level, or they will have to do a lot of catching up.

Here are a few ideas to help you play catch-up on your retirement savings…

The key to a successful retirement – and that means you can pay your bills and afford to do more than sit on the porch and watch traffic go by – is to own companies that have long-term solid growth prospects in essential industries.

Nothing is more essential than food, and Monsanto (NYSE: MON) has most of the answers for a hungry world.

DALBAR is a financial research firm from the Boston area that has been researching investor behavior for the past 30 years. Its most recent 20th annual report based on 30 years of data had some very scary things to say about the small investor.

Thirty years of data indicate that the small investor earns about half of the long-term returns of the major indexes – Dow Jones and S&P 500.

Last week, I talked about how important it is to have something set aside for long-term growth, non-income producing, even in retirement. Increased life expectancies makes 30 years of unemployment more realistic than ever before. That’s what retirement really is: 25 to 30 years of unemployment.

And one of the industries I believe will offer the best long-term growth – long term is a minimum of five years – is energy… specifically, liquefied natural gas exporters.

As I have said several times in this segment, in retirement, you cannot have all income-producing investments. You have to have some in a long-term growth investment. Something that will be there for you 10, 20, even 30 years down the road.

And one of the best places for that long-term piece of money is index funds. They are one of the simplest investments to understand and have consistently finished in the top 20% of all mutual funds.

The market’s new highs are making it tougher to find good buys, especially in the income stock area.

But take a look at big-name companies that, until the crash in 2008, had great records of paying dividends and long histories of growth and stability, but haven’t fully recovered from the crash. Not yet anyway. There are some great bargains.