For a Secure Retirement, Check Off The Basics

TODAY’S RETIREMENT is less about winding down and more about spending time on favorite pursuits and new activities. It’s an exciting next chapter in your life, but planning for it can be confusing.

With so many factors to consider when funding retirement, it’s difficult to know where to start. But a new approach — Check Off the Basics — provides a simple starting point that will help make sense of retirement income planning and break the process down into easy-to-understand steps.

The Check Off the Basics approach focuses on finding ways to help cover your essential expenses – things like a mortgage, utilities, groceries and transportation – with protected lifetime income. When you’re able to cover those basic expenses, among other things, you won’t have to worry about running out of income in retirement.

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The Check Off the Basics approach is more important now than ever. We’re living longer in our typical retirement years today: In the United States, the life expectancy after age 65 is almost 20 years, compared with about 15 years in 1970, according to United Nations’ statistics. So we need our money to last longer and have enough income to cover our essential expenses for the rest of our lives.

The good news is that annuities work well within the Check Off the Basics approach because they provide protected income throughout your lifetime, typically via monthly payments. Social Security and pensions are the only other sources of protected lifetime income.

Sign up today and you will also get a free copy of the Check Off the Basics guide that offers insights, next steps and a worksheet to help you understand how to cover your essential expenses in retirement.