Ep. 191 – Retirement Planning Considerations to Begin in 2023

Welcome to our very first episode of the year! Regardless of what the stock market will look like in 2023, you should consider some things in your retirement plan to still be in a good place.

It would be good to begin the year at the right place financially and in your retirement planning strategy. You also want to understand where you stand, whether you’re already in retirement or getting closer to retirement.

In this episode of the Secure Your Retirement podcast, we list ten items we think you should be considering, reviewing, and taking a look at as you set your 2023 goals. Listen in to learn why assessing your current financial situation will be your first step toward setting better goals for 2023.  

In this episode, find out:

• Review your financial goals with your financial advisor on how it went last year and the potential this year.
• Assess your current financial situation – be aware of your overall net worth, assets, liabilities, and savings.
• Tweak your spending plan – track your spending and have a goal as you get closer to retirement.
• Review your insurance coverages – are you getting what you’re paying for, and do you have enough?
• Consider your retirement savings – how you can continue to fund your retirement plan.
• Make a debt repayment plan – focus on getting out of debt in 2023.
• Review your investment portfolio – reduce your portfolio’s risk exposure to what you want.
• Consider your estate planning needs – prioritize getting your documents in place.
• Review your credit report to ensure there’s no fraudulent activity.
• Take advantage of tax-saving opportunities – be proactive with your contributions and donations.

Tweetable Quotes:

• “It would be good to begin the year understanding what you’re spending and what you want to be your goal as you get closer to or in retirement.”– Radon Stancil
• “Assessing that current financial situation is going to be the best first step to help you start thinking about what you want to do in 2023.”– Murs Tariq

Resources:

If you are in or nearing retirement and you want to gain clarity on what questions you should be asking, learn what the biggest retirement myths are, and identify what you can do to achieve peace of mind for your retirement, get started today by requesting our complimentary video course, Four Steps to Secure Your Retirement!

To access the course, simply visit POMWealth.net/podcast.

Here’s the full transcript:

Radon Stancil:	What do you need to consider when it comes to retirement planning as we enter 2023? Well, in this particular episode, we are going to talk about 10 things that you need to know and need to think about as you’re planning for and living throughout retirement. Our goal is by the end of this particular episode, you’ll have confidence and you’ll be focused on how to make sure you have a successful secure retirement from now all the way to 2023.
Murs Tariq:	To learn more about how to secure your retirement and all the different elements you need to know, please subscribe to our channel and hit the bell so you’ll be notified when we release episodes every Monday. We have helped hundreds of our clients gain clarity and get on the path to a great retirement. Now it’s your turn. Let’s dive in.
Radon Stancil:	Welcome everyone to our Secure Your Retirement podcast. This is the first episode of 2023. Murs and I are excited to open up the year here for 2023. We hope this is going to be a great year from a stock market perspective. But regardless of what that is, we think there are things that you need to think about, thing to consider when it comes to how you start off the year that could make the year a much better year regardless of what anything occur, else occurs in the market or in the world.
	And so what we’re going to do today is we’re going to just talk about what are some retirement planning considerations that you need to have in mind as you plan and get into 2023. So we hope this will be helpful. We’re really just going to go back and forth and talk about some of these topics. I will tell you right up front, if you are listening to this and you’re thinking, “Oh my goodness, this is a lot of information,” don’t forget we have a blog written on this particular topic as well, and it is on the website there at pomwealth.net on the blog page.
	All right, first thing that you should think about, and this is in no particular order, so we’re just going to list them out, but one thing that you should do, number one is review your financial goals. Now you might say, “Well, I’ve got a financial advisor. We do this together.” Really what this is, is this is if you have a financial advisor, you want to bring this information to them and make sure that they have it, and they should be working with you on this.
	We, for our firm in our practice, we want to meet and do financial planning goals, that kind of stuff in the first part of the year, second part of the year we do taxes. But what is it that we need to consider? Number one, how did it go last year when it came to your cash flow? Murs’s going to talk a little bit about that in a moment. We’re going to kind of go back and reiterate this. But how did it go?
	Do I need any adjustments to be made on this? And really right here is where we want to consider things like, do we have some big projects this year that we need to make sure that we consider? What could that be? I’m going to remodel the bathrooms, the kitchen, I’m putting an outside gazebo in, or I’m going to go on a very large vacation where we’ve not traveled as much as we want, so we’re going to go do a big European trip and it’s going to cost a sizable amount of money to do that.
	I’m going to get a new car. My car, I’ve been waiting, I’ve been waiting for the supply chain to get better and prices to come down. I’m going to tackle this in 2023. So I’ve got this big thing that I’ve got to buy. So those are things that need to be incorporated into your retirement focused financial plan. So you want to lay that out, say, what are the potentials?
	Another potential could be, I’m going to retire this year. I’m going to. Or I was consulting. I’m no longer going to consult. Or I’m actually getting a bigger job with bigger pay. All of those big areas are things that you want to review in your financial situation for 2023. All right, Murs, what’s our next one?
Murs Tariq:	All right. Number two is assess your current financial situation. So what does that mean? Well, that means take a look at all the different things that make up your net worth in all essence. You’ve got your assets, right? Your IRAs, your 401Ks, the house, cash in the bank, different investments, all those different things. You want to be aware of what those are.
	And we have a ton of clients that like to see them on a year by year basis, right? And see how the needle is moving. And we actually, the way that we operate is that we are updating that plan every single year so we can have a good look at what that overall net worth is. But that’s kind of looking at your assets, looking at your debts, right? If you have a mortgage, if you have car loans, any other liabilities that are out there. And looking at your savings, right?
	So having a good picture as far as what your financial situation is at the beginning of the year kind of helps you go back to number one, that Radon was just talking about, about goals. Are there things that need to be adjusted? Are there goals that we want to say for going towards paying off the mortgage or paying off the house?
	But you can’t really set those goals until you see what your starting point is. We talk about the GPS system all the time. You have to know where you are today before you can tell the GPS where to go tomorrow. Right? So assessing that current financial situation is going to be the best first step to see, help you start thinking about what you want to do in 2023.
Radon Stancil:	All right. Our next one is number three, create, or I’m going to say tweak our spending plan. Now some people call this a budget. We don’t like that, budget sounds restrictive. Spending plan sounds not restrictive, but yet we’ve got a plan. We’ve got something in place. Of the questions that Murs and I ask people when we’re doing our financial planning process, we say, “Well, here’s a question we’ve got for you.
	How much money do you spend every month?” That is probably one of the top three toughest questions to answer of all questions. And the reason why is that many people just say, “Hey, I’ve got this money coming in, we spend it and I don’t really track everything.” So it’s just more difficult. And as we get close to or in retirement, that spending plan is way, way, way more important because we got it.
	We’re trying to put together this plan to live throughout retirement. Now there are a couple of tools that you may have seen out there that basically track your spending so you don’t have to track it yourself. One that is very easy to navigate and it’s doesn’t really cost you anything. It’s called Mint, mint.com. And you can basically link that up with your credit cards, link that up with your bank account and it’ll really help you track where’s your spending going.
	Because sometimes it just gets difficult. Now an easy one that if you just don’t care, you might just say, “Hey, I use these two credit cards. So I have one and my spouse has one, or my partner has one. And I spend $3,000 a month on my card. They spend 3000, that’s six. And then we have our other bills which are 1500.
	So we know that we’re spending $7,500 a month. And we don’t really care where that’s going because we can afford $7,500 a month.” Okay, that’s cool. That’s easy. But if we don’t know that, it would be good to begin the year understanding what am I spending? This is not a restrictive question.
	This is just purely a question. What am I spending? And then what do I want to have be my goal as I get closer to or in retirement? Now if I’m in retirement, what am I spending? Where am I spending it is more detailed. You might not need to know that, but you at least need to know how much are you spending? Really, really important.
Murs Tariq:	All right. Number four, review your insurance coverage. I think we are all guilty of this, of getting the homeowner’s insurance, getting the car insurance, whatever it is, and then kind of setting and forgetting it. And I think it’s good to take some time every now and then. Not every single year, but every now and then you should just review and see, hey, are you getting what you’re paying for and do you have enough coverage?
	I know for myself, for car insurance, I pay it twice a year. It’s a biannually pay. And every time I get that bill in my email, I look at it and say, “Man, I should really look at this.” And it feels like it’s a lot, and but I just pay it. And then I get busy with life again and I kind of forget about looking at it. So always, I think there’s always reason to evaluate all those different insurances that you have.
	Right? So homeowners, a lot of times we forget about that because it’s built into our escrow and our mortgage. And so it’s just kind of, it’s kind of taken care of. But is there enough coverage on the house? The car insurance, a lot of times you don’t realize what type of coverage you have until you’re in that scenario where you’re in a car accident or something like that and you realize that your insurance wasn’t good enough.
	And so that’s something to evaluate. Outside of that, you could have liability insurance, you could have life insurance needs is also something big to be thinking about. Long-term care insurance, all these different things, whether you have it or you don’t have it, it’s something to think about. Is it benefiting me the way I have it today or should I be thinking about making some changes?
Radon Stancil:	Okay, our next one here, number five, is consider our retirement savings. Now if you’re in retirement already, you might go, “Wow, I’m not saving anymore in retirement.” But again, we might want to think about that. Are there things that we could do with our retirement savings?
	If I’ve got any kind of earned income, meaning I’m working part-time, I am doing some consulting, very likely you can be able to continue to put money into a traditional IRA or a Roth IRA even while you might be officially retired from your main career. Now if you’re still working and you got a few years left before you get to retirement, then there are some adjustments to consider for 2023.
	Now we’re going to do an entire episode on this here at the beginning of the year, but there are adjustments. We can now fund a little bit more aggressively because of some adjustments to 401K contributions, IRA contributions, and particularly the catch up number.
	And I’m saying catch up like C-A-T-C-H up, not the red stuff ketchup. But we can catch up and we can do that if we’re 50 or over. We’ll be able to fund a little bit more into our plans in 2023. So we want to consider all those.
	Another one that I’m just going to lump in here would be, do I want to look at my retirement savings and maybe convert some of that traditional money that’s in a traditional 401K or a traditional IRA that’s tax deferred over to a Roth IRA that grows tax free? And that’s a whole separate conversation within itself. But those are all things that we kind of want to start thinking about as we’re entering into 2023 so that we go ahead and pick up those contributions if it is anything that we want to do or is possible.
Murs Tariq:	All right, number six, make a debt repayment plan. So this is speaking to your liabilities. Right? If you’ve got a mortgage, if you’ve got car payments, if you have credit card debt, start thinking about how you want to get out of debt. And sometimes people like the idea of retiring without any debt or retiring without a mortgage payment. Mortgage payment’s typically the biggest line item in a budget.
	So all these things, all these things that were listing off kind of go hand in hand, right? Radon was talking about understanding what your expenses are. Well, your expenses are often going towards your liabilities, those credit card payments, the car payments, the mortgage. So start thinking about what do I want to attack? I say attack because you want to get rid of, you want to be debt free at some point in your life, ideally.
	That’s kind of the dream. Right? So think about what you want to focus on as far as, for 2023, as far as debt repayments and come up with the plan around it. And a lot of times that involves tweaking your budget a little bit so that you can throw a little bit more towards that debt that is outstanding.
	Typically, the rule of thumb here is that you want to attack the debt that is the most expensive. So usually credit card. Credit card debt’s going to be the most expensive, the highest interest rate. Other options are that you could think about consolidating into say a debt type of consolidation, like taking out a home equity line of credit to pay off your credit cards and now you’re at a lower interest rate. So things like that. We’ve got plenty of ideas around that if you’d like to discuss. So but yeah, that’s a big goal for 2023 to be thinking about.
Radon Stancil:	All right, number seven, review your investment portfolio. Now Murs and I talk a lot about risk management and how much we are at risk. And as we get closer and closer to retirement or in retirement or we live through something like 2022 where the markets were affected by increasing inflation, geopolitical issues, all those kinds of things, do we need to do a reassessment of what our view of risk is.
	And that means we might need to even de-risk our portfolio even further. Now in our approach, we actually de-risk the portfolios automatically for our clients, but it’s still within a threshold. So we’ve got some of our clients that say, “Hey, I’m okay with more risk.” We got some that want to say, “I have less risk.”
	But the reality is you need to do this yearly, that you look at your portfolio and say, “Is my risk exposure equal to how I want it to be?” And we get many of our folks that come in here that are not our clients and we talk to them and we say, “Hey, how do you view risk?” And we have a whole entire conversation around risk.
	And then they come up with and they say, “Here’s how I view risk.” We then do an analysis of their portfolio and almost every time their portfolio is much higher risk exposure, has much more risk exposure than what they really want. And the reason why they’ve never really done an in-depth look at it from that. So review your portfolio strategy, review your risk, make sure you do that here, right in the beginning of 2023.
Murs Tariq:	All right, number eight, consider your estate planning needs. This is a big one. I see, talk to people all the time that are wealthy, they’ve done a good job saving and they’re coasting through retirement, but they don’t have any documentation as far as their estate plan. Your estate plan is what your wishes are for when you are not there. So typically that’s a will or a trust.
	It’s also for when you are there, when you are living, but may potentially incapacitated, documents like power of attorneys that help others help you. So these are very vital documents that you need to have. If you don’t have them very, that would be priority number one as far as getting those in 2023. For our clients, we, as we get to know them and understand them, their estate planning needs, we have it set up that they have the opportunity to get those all done through partnerships that we have with our company.
	So we put a lot of weight on having those documents because you don’t want to be in that scenario. We’ve seen it before where something happens and we don’t have the proper documents in place or beneficiaries on file or power of attorneys available to help through that. Those which end up being difficult situations. So very important, consider your estate planning needs like your wills, power of attorneys, trust, documents, anything like that.
Radon Stancil:	All right, number nine, review your credit report. Now you might be thinking, “Wait a minute, I don’t have any need for credit right now and this is not a big deal to me.” But there are reasons that you should do a check-in on your credit report. One of those is, is to make sure that there’s no fraudulent activity on your credit report. We’ve heard of a lot of people having their identity stolen.
	It’s becoming even more problem now with cybersecurity. And because of folks that are spend a lot of their time trying to figure out how to hack individuals computers and phones and all that kind of information, we are more exposed. So that should not make us scared. What it should do is just make us alert.
	And so what we encourage is, hey, starting off the year, do a check. Look at all of your three major bureaus for who reports credit and just say, “Hey, do I have anything here that looks weird? What is my credit score? Do I have any activity occurring that I didn’t know about?” And those are going to be great indicators and it would be much better. You can take care of that much easier if you check that right here at the beginning of the year.
Murs Tariq:	All right, and finally, number 10, take advantage of tax saving opportunities. We, nobody likes paying taxes, but we have to pay taxes. But can we be more efficient about how we’re paying our taxes? And that’s always the question. We work closely with the CPA that says, “I’m all about paying taxes, but I do not like tipping the IRS.” Right?
	So keep that. We want that in your mindset of being proactive and not just waiting until April of the calendar year to file your previous year’s tax return, there are things that you could be doing throughout the year. So take a look at your contributions into your retirement plans if you’re still working, take a look at contributions to IRAs. Both of those are going to help potentially reduce your overall tax bill.
	Donations to charities that you may be doing. There could be better ways to be doing that. If you’re above the age of 70, if you’re at the age of 72 and above, which is the required minimum distribution years and you do give charitably, there’s strategies there that we talk to our clients about all the time that you can be saving on taxes in that way.
	So all that to say is that you want to be proactive about your tax situation and not just wait for the filing of the tax return. Because usually when it comes to the filing of the tax return, there’s very little that can be done and you want to be thinking about it all throughout the year. So have a conversation. If you’re working with an advisor, have a conversation with them, “Hey, am I doing everything?” And also if you’re working with a CPA, “Hey, am I doing everything that I can be to make my tax situation a little bit more efficient?”
Radon Stancil:	All right, we’ve gone through 10 things to think about as you get ready for and are going to live through 2023. We hope it’s going to be a great year. We certainly appreciate all of you who listened to us. It is amazing how many episodes that we’ve been able to put out as we’ve started this project in 2020. We continue to hear great feedback and we’ll continue to deliver at what we hope is great value to you.
	By the way, don’t forget there is a blog written on this. And all as always, we love to hear your feedback. So if you give us a rating, give us a written review, we certainly would appreciate it. We hope that we’re delivering what you find to be helpful. But we hope you have a great year and we look forward to talking to you again next Monday.
	We hope this video has given you some confidence and clarity as you plan for a worry-free life and retirement. But what else do you need? We have created a complimentary video course called 3 Keys To Secure Your Retirement. This video walks you through step by step what you need to do to get ready for retirement. You can also check out our podcast called Secure Your Retirement. You can subscribe below.
Murs Tariq:	For more retirement tips, check out these videos. Also, if you find them valuable, please subscribe to our YouTube channel and give us a like.