by Sandi Martin | Jun 24, 2013 | Blog, Budgets, Personal Finance, Retirement, Series: Avoiding the Useless Retirement Plan
The point: planning for your retirement isn’t just about your investments, although you can be forgiven for thinking it is. It involves exactly the same activities as planning for tomorrow, next week, and next month: active budgeting, debt elimination, robust...
by Sandi Martin | Jun 20, 2013 | Blog, Personal Finance, Retirement, Retirement Calculators, Series: Avoiding the Useless Retirement Plan
The point: retirement calculators are only as good as the information you put in them and the underlying assumptions of the calculator itself, and are useful only to model the future, not predict it. The lure of the retirement calculator is that it will tell you your...
by Sandi Martin | Jun 5, 2013 | Blog, Personal Finance, Retirement, Series: Avoiding the Useless Retirement Plan
The point: Retirement planning using general assumptions about your future income is just retirement guessing. And – surprise – it’s useless. Seriously? Three posts into a retirement series and we haven’t even answered the question “how...
by Sandi Martin | May 30, 2013 | Blog, Budgets, Personal Finance, Retirement, Series: Avoiding the Useless Retirement Plan
The point: You can’t plan where you’re going until you know where you want to go and where you’re starting from. Do you know what you want out of life? If that sounds like a surprisingly navel-focused question coming from a financial planner,...
by Sandi Martin | May 27, 2013 | Blog, Personal Finance, Retirement, Series: Avoiding the Useless Retirement Plan
The point: A realistic retirement plan doesn’t start with a number and work backwards; it starts with the question “why?” Quick, go to the personal finance section of you newspaper or feed reader and count how many articles and posts from last week...
by Sandi Martin | May 21, 2013 | Blog, Inside the Bank, Personal Finance, Retirement
The point: buying an RRSP sometime between January and March doesn’t mean you have a retirement plan. Go into any bank between January 2nd and February 28th and you will be haunted by the specter of an underfunded retirement. You will be offered...
