In the past few years, the value of U.S. retirement plans have lost almost 2 trillion dollars. So, if you are betting on your best 403 b retirement plan and/or alternative retirement plan to support you throughout your retirement years, you should start to pay attention to your retirement plan statements.
Most investors, after they’ve chosen the initial investments, rarely look at their portfolio again. To have the best chance of actually having a retirement portfolio that will support you once you retire, you have to manage it.
The first task that you have to tackle as you start to manage your portfolio, is to assess its current value. In quite a few of the cases you’ll discover that the investments that you originally opened your accounts with are no longer the ideal assets that they seemed when you first chose them. The calculations are easy if you use retirement plan software to plan your portfolio.
When you have calculated the present value of your portfolio, depending on how long you have until retirement, you may have to re-assess your retirement options.
If you’re fortunate, your portfolio will have out-performed your income assumptions and you don’t have to change your retirement plans. If, however, like most people, your portfolio has under-performed your income projections, you have some hard decisions to make.
Your choices generally fall into one of three options. You can either choose to increase the monies that you are putting into your account to bring it up to what you’ve projected its value to be at this point. Or you can downsize your expected retirement lifestyle to match your portfolio’s new projected future value based on it’s value today.
The last and final choice you have, is to delay your retirement for a few years to build up your retirement nest or, alternatively, to plan on working part time when you finally retire, in order to avoid having to drop your standard of living.
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