Читать книгу Personal Finance After 50 For Dummies - Eric Tyson - Страница 56

IN THIS CHAPTER

Figuring out when to retire

Determining your financial needs and wants

Understanding your financial building blocks

Crunching and tweaking the numbers

Preparing for the nonfinancial side of retirement

Many folks dream about retiring. No more racing to catch the commuter train or beat the worst of rush-hour traffic. Say goodbye to long, endless meetings about topics in which you have little or no interest. Instead, you’ll have plenty of free time to do the things you can rarely find the time and energy to do while you’re working. It sure sounds appealing, doesn’t it?

Although many folks dream about retiring, few are preparing. A survey conducted by the Employee Benefit Research Institute regarding Americans’ planning for retirement found that

 About 67 percent of working adults surveyed are actually saving for retirement.

 Of those who are saving, 43 percent have a nest egg of less than $50,000.

 About half of survey participants simply guess at the amount of their retirement needs.

We think your future plans are important enough to deserve more than a guess! But we understand that your free time is valuable to you and that you have more interesting things to do than number crunching to determine your retirement needs. So in this chapter, we promise to provide plenty of retirement planning insights and tips without spending gobs of your time. Before we dig into the financial part of planning retirement, though, we discuss some general retirement topics that are as important or even more important. You need to have a firm grasp of these items as well.