Millennial Employees: Have you Used a Retirement Calculator?

Published on June 14, 2016

Check on Your Road Map to Your Retirement Goals.

Millennials have a long work life ahead of them, which comes with a long retirement horizon. Those who start saving early and often will do well when it comes to building retirement wealth.

As part of your retirement planning, have you tried a retirement calculator? You can plug in your age, income and other information into these online tools, which determine if you are saving enough to meet stated retirement income goals, or tell you how much you’ll need in your IRA to live comfortably. You can check some of them out at Bankrate.com, AARP, or CNN Money among other sites.

If you are a millennial (described as between the ages of 18 and 35), you are looking ahead to decades more of work life and earning—but are you thinking about your retirement life as well? No matter what your income level or living expenses, it’s always a great idea to find a way to put a little something away (and put away more as your earnings rise).

It’s scary to think about, or too intangible when you’re in your 20s or 30s to think about what you’ll need to live on in your 70s, 80s, and beyond; but planning and saving now—and investing well—will help you be more prepared for what lies ahead. After all, the numbers associated with comfortable retirement living far exceed what you’ll
collect (if you’ll collect) from Social Security.

Save early and often – and self-direct your retirement investments

As you progress through life, your needs will change, as will your priorities and perhaps your investing knowledge as well. If you are comfortable researching various types of investments and making your own investment decisions, you can kick your retirement journey into a higher gear by opening a self-directed retirement plan. The retirement calculators provide something of a road map but self-direction can help get you where you want to go by investing in alternative assets; these nontraditional investments are prohibited from typical retirement plans but savvy investors can take advantage of what they already know and understand with alternatives.

Self-directed retirement plans can include a wide variety of alternative assets such as commodities, precious metals, real estate, hedge funds, secured or unsecured loans, and much more. As the years go by and your investing knowledge grows, you can build a more eclectic retirement portfolio and of course, as a younger worker now, you have the luxury of time for course corrections along the way that older people don’t have.

So, go ahead and fill out that retirement calculator—and do it periodically to make sure you’re on the right track. Stay the course, or correct it as needed to keep building up your retirement nest egg. And, make a pit stop to Next Generation Trust Services’ Starter Kits to open a self-directed IRA and ramp up your savings with alternative assets. You can also download our white paper that explains it all to you, or contact our self-direction experts at Info@NextGenerationTrust.com or 888.857.8058 with your questions.