While we can talk about concepts such as inflation and purchasing power the struggle for many people today is earning enough income on their savings to meet their lifestyle needs. Interest rates and the earnings from capital through dividends, bonds and real estate rental income have dropped dramatically in the past few years.
Making the right choices for protecting you and your loved ones in the case of a premature death comes down to understanding some basic principles and rules of thumb. The first is that the name is all wrong; life insurance does not help you, it helps to protect the standard of living and lifestyle of those you leave behind. So more accurately it should be called something like: loved one's lifestyle assurance plan?.
To truly appreciate the role that inflation plays in your ability to build assets and achieve financial freedom one has to consider the role of its dance partner: purchasing power. You can't have one without the other!
It is that time of year again when attention turns to RRSPs and tax planning. This year's contribution deadline is March 3rd, 2014 if you want to deduct the contribution against your 2013 income tax return.
The purpose for making an RRSP contribution, from a financial strategy perspective, is to build savings and assets over time so that you can replace earned employment income with passive or investment income for your retirement years. In other words you can sleep in and still have the lifestyle you want without going to work!
In our previous article, we looked at how seniors generally wish to invest their money to feel safe while in reality their expenses rise throughout their retirement years as the cost of various services, such as hydro and property taxes, typically increase annually. ( See graph at bottom )
Your choices are to either decrease your spending or deplete your savings or some combination of the two in order to make ends meet. The challenge is to make sure you don't run out of money before you run of time!
In the mid - 1960s conventional wisdom or motherhood for retirement planning said that you should take all of your investments and put them into government bonds or fixed income type products. The thinking was that you could not afford to take any 'risk' in your retirement years. Thus it was believed that guaranteed investing was the best approach to retirement planning and they were correct at that time.
