If you want to leave an inheritance for your children and grandchildren, it is important to make sure that your assets are not all spent in your retirement. That requires good retirement planning. Unfortunately, Baby Boomers are collectively making a lot of mistakes.
The best estate plan in the world can be rendered completely useless if there are no assets for the estate to distribute. A trust, for example, is just a piece of paper if there are no funds for the trustee to manage and distribute to beneficiaries.
Despite this truism many Baby Boomers are not properly planning for their retirements, which is a good way to make sure that their estates will lack assets.
Fox Business recently wrote about some of these mistakes in “Baby Boomers’ Retirement Woes Summed Up in 5 Statistics.”
These mistakes include:
- Social Security – 59% of Baby Boomers are planning to rely heavily on Social Security. The problem is that Social Security benefits are not designed to provide a full income and they may need to be cut in the future.
- No Savings – 45% of Baby Boomers do not have any retirement savings at all.
- Postponed Plans – 30% of Boomers report that they have had to postpone their planned retirements due to lack of savings.
- Stopped Contributions – 30% of Baby Boomers stopped making regular contributions to their retirement accounts. It is important to make contributions even if you do not think you need any more money in the accounts.
- Debt – 44% of people over the age of 65 still have debt that needs to be paid off. Debt payments cut into the amount of money they have for living expenses.
This is not good news for Baby Boomers or the children expecting to inherit from them.
Reference: Fox Business (May 15, 2016) “Baby Boomers’ Retirement Woes Summed Up in 5 Statistics“
