Читать книгу Retirement Planning For Dummies - Matthew Krantz - Страница 11

IN THIS CHAPTER

Understanding the importance of retirement planning

Seeing how retirement planning has evolved

Discovering the new role for employers in retirement planning

Finding out how defined contribution plans have taken over pensions

Getting an understanding of why Social Security isn’t enough for a comfortable retirement

If you’re like most people, you want to retire someday. You might love your job and plan to work well into your 70s. Or maybe you’re part of the financial independence retire early (FIRE) crowd and want to escape your corporate ball-and-chain at 40 years old. The beauty of retirement planning is that the timing of your retirement could be up to you.

The goal of this book is to help you get excited about retirement planning. All too often, people are fearful of saving and investing for retirement. You might fear that you aren't saving enough or that you’ve started too late. Fear, I’ve found, isn’t a great motivator. Instead, it causes retirement-planning paralysis.

In addition, some people get so discouraged about being off track with their retirement planning that they just give up. They figure they’ll never catch up to where they think they need to be. Cautionary tales of people who have not saved enough only make people more depressed. You can find lots of those stories. Maybe people you know shared their stories with you.

Put the fear and discouragement aside for a minute. This retirement-planning book is different. I want you to embrace, not dread, retirement planning. What better way to plan for the future than picturing what you want it to look like and then making it happen? Expectations must match reality, but you might be amazed at what you can do when you set your mind to a goal.

Retirement planning is an important way to plot your financial course. And the course you set by reading this book will help make sure that your life 20, 30, 40, or 50 years from now is what you think it should be.

In this chapter, you find out why retirement planning is largely an opportunity for you to plan your own future, rather than have it dictated to you by your employer or government. You also see why getting your plan started as soon as possible pays off in a big way.