Don’t Take Even $1 From Your Retirement Account Until You Take This Important Step | Smart Change: Personal Finance

(Christy Pepper)

When you enter retirement, you will have to start withdrawing money from your 401(k) or other investment accounts. This requires a massive shift in mindset, given that you’ve been building these accounts your whole life. And you have to be smart about when and how much to quit.

Before you start calculating distributions, there is one basic thing you must do first.

Image source: Getty Images.

Take this step before withdrawing money from your retirement account

Before making any withdrawals from retirement savingsYou need to select a safe withdrawal rate. This is basically an amount of money that you can take out of your investment accounts without You take a big risk that you will dry up your account too soon.

People also read…

See, you’ll need to rely on your retirement investments throughout your entire graduation years. You cannot live on Social Security benefits alone without additional savings. This is not possible because Social Security only replaces 40% of your pre-retirement income, and you need to replace about 70% to 80% of what you earned before you left the workforce. Social Security benefits are We are also seeing its value depreciate over time, So you will need your savings more later in life. This happens because the increased benefits built into Social Security don’t work well for Older people suffer from inflation.

If you take out too much money from retirement accounts too quickly, you won’t have enough money left over invested in income-producing assets. Your returns will start to decline, so your account balance will shrink more with each withdrawal. In the end, you may end up with $0.

Determining a safe withdrawal rate helps reduce the chances of this happening. You still have plenty of money to work for you and earn returns if you limit how much you get once. If you can, say, earn 7% annually in returns and you only get 4% or 5% of your account balance, you won’t see the total value of your account go down even while withdrawing funds.

How do you determine a safe withdrawal rate?

In an ideal world, you would only be able to live off the benefits you earn and you would be able to avoid reducing your principal balance at all. But this often does not work in practice.

Older people tend to invest conservatively because they cannot risk significant losses if the market declines. They may not be able to wait for a recovery if they have a lot of exposure to stocks. And even if you get generous returns in some years, there may be years when you don’t and you will still need to rely on your savings to provide income.

This means that you will need a different withdrawal strategy.

One common rule that seniors follow is to withdraw 4% of their retirement accounts during the first year of retirement and then increase withdrawals according to inflation each year. While the chances of running out of money were very small with this approach, the lower expected future returns and longer life expectancy made following the 4% rule more risky.

retirement research center Recommend an alternative approach: Use the Minimum Required Distribution (RMD) tables created by the IRS to calculate 401(k) withdrawals to determine how much you should withdraw from all of your accounts—even if you’re not yet required to take RMDs.

You can also work with a financial advisor to develop a personalized approach that works for you given your age, risk tolerance, life span, and the amount you’ve invested to support yourself. Whatever you do, don’t take your money until you decide how much you can comfortably withdraw, or you may end up regretting it.

The $18,984 Social Security bonus is totally overlooked by most retirees

If you’re like most Americans, you’re behind on retirement savings for a few years (or more). But a few little-known “Social Security secrets” can help ensure a higher retirement income. For example: One easy trick can pay you up to $18,984 extra…every year! Once you learn how to maximize your Social Security benefits, we believe you can retire with confidence with the peace of mind we all seek. Simply click here to discover how to learn more about these strategies.

Motley Fool has a profile Disclosure Policy.

Leave a Comment