Daniel Ronberg walks through five steps before retiring: calculate your exact monthly income needs, maximize Social Security using the optimal claiming age, map out taxes at key ages like 62 and 70, pay off high-interest debt, and plan your health insurance transition to Medicare. Paying off debt often boosts cash flow more than earning new income.
Even if they feel confident that they've saved well for retirement, there is a scarcity factor when they go to retire and they start to show up as a lesser version of themselves. Valuable content are going to be shared and we're literally impacting lives. There's been a lot happening this year with our current administration that is affecting our clients. Hey everyone. I want to welcome you to this video. This is a special collaboration series with my good friend Denzel Rodriguez from for the finance geek community, I'm Daniel Ronberg and my specialty is helping people realize their purpose and move into retirement in an abundant mindset. Today I'm going to give you the five things you want to do before you retire. So number one is you want to know your monthly income number. Retirement is really a simple math problem. How much income are you going to need? Where is that income going to come from? If you know your numbers like Denzel teaches, this should be something that's actually very easy for you to step into and, and probably a lot of you already know, what is the amount of money you need to live your ordinary lifestyle and expenses for the rest of your life and how are you going to cover that income? Step number two moves us into knowing your Social Security. So many people are barreling towards retirement with no plan for Social Security. There's phenomenal ways that you can maximize that benefit for you, your spouse, your individual circumstance. Knowing your Social Security is going to be the cornerstone, the first piece of of how you're going to meet those monthly expenses in retirement. So knowing your Social Security and how to maximize your Social Security. At Nations First Financial, all of our clients and everybody we work with receives a Social Security maximization report. It's a calculator we have that tells you exactly when to claim Social Security so you can get every amount that you're entitled to out of it to the penny and maximize it to the fullest. Number three is to know your taxable situation. Everybody I meet with, I feel like their anxieties about retirement are calmed down when once I forecast their income and what their income is going to be after taxes, a lot of people just have these big question marks about what are taxes going to look like for me in retirement? What's my income going to be in retirement? And it changes pretty substantially. So just mapping out those couple of things, what's your income going to be and what is it going to be after taxes can really ease your anxiousness or your uncertainty about what retirement is going to look like for you. So I would highly encourage you to know your taxes. There's all kinds of key ages in retirement. 59 and a half age 60, 62, 63, 65, 67. Right. 70, 73, 75. There's all kinds of key tax ages in retirement. And knowing what to do at each juncture and how to maximize your tax situation so you can ultimately maximize the income you have is so important for you to be able to know and have confidence in retirement. Number four, everyone's already aware of this one. It's getting rid of bad debts. So, again, one of the biggest drags on your retirement income can be bad debt. This is going to be, you know, credit card debt that's at full interest, that is just for purchases that you know you're carrying that are really expensive and are costing you on your monthly income. You know, getting rid of those kinds of consumer debts and things that are just going to hold you back can really be one of the biggest drivers for income. And in fact, if you're five to ten years away from retirement, I would encourage you to actually look at your debts first, because oftentimes the biggest way to move that needle for cash flow is to remove debt, because the monthly obligation on those debts is often much higher than than what you could use creating that same amount of income with that money that you have. So, again, another way to say that would be you're better off paying off debt than trying to create income with that same amount of money. Because, again, financiers are smart. They have it stacked in their favor. There's these amortization schedules where they're going to be able to collect a lot of interest. And if you actually look at the effective interest cost on your debts, sometimes it's kind of staggering. You think you have a 4% car note when really you have a substantially higher amount when you look at how much of that payment is is interest versus principal. And so a lot of times we encourage people to just focus on paying off debt. You know, Denzel with Accelerated Payoff Strategies, does a phenomenal job of helping you to crush that debt as quick as possible. And so that's a really, really key prerequisite that I'm hoping is in alignment with something you're already doing or thinking about doing or learning about currently. And number five is knowing your health insurance situation. That's going to be if you retire and you no longer have coverage through your employer, you know, where are you going to get health insurance? Health insurance, believe it or not, along with the mortgage and taxes, has become one of the biggest barriers to people's retirement. People will work longer just to get health insurance because it's so expensive on a monthly basis. So knowing where your health insurance is going to come from, knowing if you're qualified for subsidies through the Affordable Care act, knowing your situation is going to be so important, and then having the proper coverages in retirement, right, you're going to go on Medicare at some point. But there's supplemental coverages that are really important to know about. There's different Medicare plans, there's long term care insurance, there's all kinds of important things to make sure. You have to make sure that your health is covered for no matter what happens for the rest of your life. And a lot of people don't know this, but those chronic care long term care events are not covered by Medicare. So having those supplemental pieces and insurance can be so important to make sure you protect not only your health, but your wealth as well. So again, these are the five key things that I'd be paying close attention to if I was getting ready to retire. If you want more clarity on these, or you want to meet with me personally to go through these for you, click the link down below. I'm setting up complimentary time with everybody that watches Collaborative Series personally to help guide you through this process. Thanks so much for watching and I hope to see you all very soon. Take care.
