The 3 Step Formula For Your Retirement Readiness

Bob and Jane come into my office to discuss when they should file for Social Security.  Three things I need to know to guide them: 1. What are their PIAs (don't know what PIA is? click here: https://youtu.be/EoMQSwVh0XE) 2. What their Income NEEDS will be. Now this is SO much more important than simply taking a percentage of current income, like 80%.  This is a rule of thumb that is highly used in the industry but is not specific enough to YOU.  We need to understand truly what your expenses will be! Everything, and I mean, EVERYTHING is contingent of an accurate accounting of your cash flow needs...in retirement. What you spend today may have no relationship to what you spend in retirement.  So, there is some guesswork involved but it's important to take the time to truly analyze and predict future expenditures. 3. Value of your liquid net worth.       Liquid net worth includes your investment accounts and bank accounts.  Any type of accounts that can be quickly converted to cash to be used to live on.  Once we identify these three things, we can come up with a pretty thorough idea of when is the best time for Jane and Bob to file for their Social Security benefits.  It will be important to understand the health of both too.  After all, if Bob isn't long for this world,  we probably will have different planning than if he most likely to live until he's 100. In this video, I use a very simple Google Spreadsheet to analyze the options Jane and Bob have when it comes to optimizing Social Security.  You can easily recreate this for your own analysis as well.