Baby Boomers Retirement Planning

For baby boomers retirement planning started just like everyone else. We started in our late teens to early twenties expecting to have millions saved up by the time we were 50 and the we were going to retire early. Our retirement money was going to be invested so it made top dollar. And then when the internet came into everyone's home we were going to become financial wizards. We could now manipulate our own retirement finances.

Baby boomers retirement planning became a game. A very costly game for some I remember a co-worker of mine in the early 1990s lost half a million dollars within a 48 hour period in her retirement plan. She was heart sick! She was one of those that were always messing with her own stocks and her financial planning bit the dust, never to regain back to its original size. I was so glad my husband and I left our retirement planning to the professionals that had degrees and made it their life's career to know what they were doing with our money. Too many baby boomers that we knew lost most of their retirement savings. We lost some money but not nearly as much as we would have had we been messing around with our investments.

Retirement planning should be left to professionals. You need to find someone whom you trust and can get satisfactory answers from. You do want to be able to know what is going on with your retirement investment to ensure that you are getting the best you can out of your investments.

We have simple retirement plans. Our retirement plans do not include spending a lot on high end products or living the high life. As baby boomers are noted for living in today and letting tomorrow take care of itself, we will not be living that high. We have lived our life so far by keeping it simple so we expect to live our retirement in the same way.

Basically our simple retirement plans include making an income after retirement. We are not planning on living off of our savings or investments. As stated in the first hub on boomer retirement, we want some type of income that we can do on the road. As of a couple of days ago we still have not figured out how we are going to accomplish this. So far about the only thing we have come up with is being freelancers. Not sure this would be feasible but it is an option so far.

We could simply write about our retirement as nomads traveling the country. Not sure we could make enough money to live off of this but it is one option we are looking into. It would depend on how much time out of our retirement plans that this would involve.There is no way we want to have a retirement job that was all consuming.This does however fit into our plans of keeping simple retirement plans.

Our way of retirement planning was to have a retirement plan set up so we were into a position to be able to roll over our 401K into the hands of a qualified financial planner. Instead of just putting all our money into a 401K we also stuck some money away into our own investment accounts. For this we used a financial consultant. We used the same financial firm for quite some time so we have become more personal with our financial planner.

My husband and I felt this was more beneficial for us in the long term when we were into retirement. We would already be established with a firm that we trusted and we had a history with. Now as we are just a couple of years from retirement we are feeling more confident in our future as retirees.

I am not suggesting that people do not use their companies 401K plan as most companies will match your 401K contributions. This is how our companies handled this. This is like bonus money.