Retirement Planning: A Primary Source of Money

Written For Use ByDoeren MayhewRetirement usually means a lot of free time from now on. There are also two thingsthat automatically come to mind, social security and employer pensions.Unfortunately, these two may not be enough to support the life of a retiree. Benefitfrom social security is deemed to be too small and there are less and lessemployers willing to provide pensions.Because of this, people find out that their personal income on both the retirementand off-retirement accounts are very good financial support upon retirement.Social SecurityIf you want to be entitled for its benefits, the system will require contribution fromyou tantamount to minimum of 10 years. The benefits will be determined on yourcalculated earnings prior to retirement and your decided age of retirement to startreceiving these benefits. The good side is that benefits rise with inflation. The down side is that the earningused to determine the amount of benefit is capped. The cap is a disadvantage forthose people who earn huge income for they will receive proportionately less of their pre-retirement earning compared to those who earn below the cap.In order to receive full benefits from your social security, you need to be on theright retirement age. The retirement age before is 65. However, actual required fullretirement age is increasing for those born in 1938 or later. It reaches the ripe ageof 67 for individuals born after 1959.If you want to check out how much benefit you can get, go to the website of SocialSecurity Administration at www.ssa.gov. You can also review the annual statementsent by SSA to your registered address, which they send to you three months beforeyour birthday.Getting your benefits at an earlier versus later year You may choose to start getting your benefits at an early age of 62. The only catchis that of course the amount is going to be lesser than what you will be getting onceyou reach your full retirement age. For instance, you retired at age 62 but your fullage of retirement is 66, you will just get 75% of your supposedly benefits once youreach that age. You will increase it by waiting.If you still want to increase the benefits that you will get, you can try to wait for ayear or so once you have reached your full retirement age. As an example, if your