5 Things to Do 5 Years From Retirement
Transcript
[00:00:03] This is Antwone Harris with Platinum Bridge Wealth Strategies, and I want to give you five things to do five years from retirement. The first thing you want to look into getting a home equity line of credit. You don't want to use it. You want to have this home equity line for emergencies so that you do not have to deplete your valuable retirement resources if there's an emergency.
[00:00:24] So if the roof leaks or there's a medical issue that's not covered by insurance, you want to have access to money that you can get to quickly for unexpected expenses. Now, you want to do this while you're still working because it's very difficult to get a home equity line once you retire.
[00:00:40] Two. You want to be sure to build up money outside of the 401k account. I have many clients that have most of their retirement funds all locked into a 403B or a 401k. Every time I pull money out to give them to to live on, they have to pay taxes. If we have money in a non-retirement account, there are things we can do to help mitigate taxes.
[00:01:01] So, typically, if there's any gains, you're going to pay long-term capital gains taxes. That's typically lower than what you would pay for an income tax. If there are losses in that non-retirement account, I can book those losses and use those losses to offset gains. And in some cases I can net out the gains and losses and the clients are paying zero in taxes for money that I'm raising for their living expenses. So it's very important to build up money outside of that retirement account.
[00:01:29] Three, you should have two years of withdrawals in cash or cash equivalent. So the withdrawals would be, say for example, if you're taking Social Security and you're getting $3,000 a month and you need $10,000 a month to live on, we will be taking $7,000 a month from your retirement funds. You should have two years in cash or cash equivalents in case the markets go down. We're not required to sell stocks at fire sale prices to meet your living expenses. So that's very important. We want two years of cash or cash equivalent at all times during retirement.
[00:02:02] Four is you want to come up with your health insurance game plan before you retire. You want to make sure that we have our healthcare game plan in place before you retire, especially if you're retiring before you're eligible for Medicare at age 65. If you're retiring early, we need to figure out what we're going to do there. We need to get all that documented to make sure that we have full and adequate health insurance during retirement.
[00:02:24] Finally, I have many successful professionals that tell me they're going to consult for the first part their retirement, but they don't have anything set up. These relationships that you have, your credibility, et cetera, dries up very quickly when you retire. So I always urge my clients to have that business plan set up, have those relationships galvanized, talk to people and potential customers before you retire and make sure that it's viable. Get a feel for the to the people that may become clients of yours and have everything all established before you retire to set up that consulting business.
[00:02:58] This is Antwone Harris with Platinum Bridge Wealth Strategies, and I'll talk to you soon.