Free-Reprint Article Written by: Irene A. Majchrzak See Terms of Reprint Below.
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More articles discuss your retirement accounts, what the mutual funds really look like internally, how to choose investments based on your tolerance for risk and different strategies for investing in today's economy. What is only lightly touched on is protection of your lifestyle today and in Retirement, which is what you will discover in this article... Additional Article Information: =============================== 872 Words; formatted to 65 Characters per Line Distribution Date and Time: 2009-07-07 13:36:00 Written By: Irene A. Majchrzak Copyright: 2009 Contact Email: mailto:[email protected] Irene A. Majchrzak's Picture URL: http://debtfreetoretire.com/images/portrait-small.jpg For more free-reprint articles by Irene A. Majchrzak, please visit: http://www.thePhantomWriters.com/recent/author/irene-a_-majchrzak.html ============================================= Special Notice For Publishers and Webmasters: ============================================= If you use this article on your website or in your ezine, We Want To Know About It. Use the following URL to let us know where you have used this article, and we will include a link to your website on thePhantomWriters.com: http://thephantomwriters.com/notify.php?id=6792&p=load HTML Copy-and-Paste and TEXT Copy-and-Paste Versions Of Article Are Available at: http://thePhantomWriters.com/free_content/db/m/protect-your-retirement.shtml#get_code --------------------------------------------------------------------- Protection of Your Hard-Earned Retirement Copyright (c) 2009 Irene A. Majchrzak Debt Free To Retire http://debtfreetoretire.com/ Many articles discuss debt, what it is, how to get out and stay out, how to learn to spend cash instead of using credit cards and how to give up the bad debt habits developed over a lifetime. More articles discuss your retirement accounts, what the mutual funds really look like internally, how to choose investments based on your tolerance for risk and different strategies for investing in today's economy. What is only lightly touched on is protection of your lifestyle today and in Retirement. In the recent past, one year ago, I would have recommended today's protection begin with a cash reserve of 3-6 months of cash to carry your debts of mortgage, taxes, utility bills, food, and gas for your car. Added up this amount may total $10,000. The economy may be coming back or it may be a bubble that could burst into a new down market or bear market therefore, saving in a cash reserve today doubles the amount of money you need to protect your lifestyle for 6-9 months. Obviously, if you don't have a cash reserve trying to get thousands of dollars into a cash reserve fund may be really difficult. In financial planning programs, I usually encourage my clients to consider 60 months of saving to come up with the money. Does not having the time to save mean you should not start to save? Absolutely not! Primarily, because you may not lose your job or have emergency expenses that will drain your savings. You need to start somewhere to protect your lifestyle. So while you are paying down any credit card debt try to save some money in a bank account. Increase the savings as your debt decreases always keeping in mind that purchases must be managed as well to keep from being overburdened again, with debt. If necessary save some money into another account for those items you feel are essential to buy. This is also a good time to review your life insurance or disability insurance available through your employer. You are probably aware of your health insurance benefits and may not have decided to take advantage of the insurance opportunities that are yours for very little money through your employer. Talk to your Human Resources department or your benefit manager to find out what your costs are, what coverage you will have and the possibility of covering your spouse and children. Protection of your lifestyle depends on making sure you will not go into debt through the use of credit cards to manage your bills while you are unable to work. If you are retired or soon to be retired, you may want to evaluate your benefit package to see how it is impacted once you are retired. Start with your health insurance. Medicare does not become available until you are 65. You will need to have coverage until then. Check with your employer based program. Understand the benefits and consider changing your health benefits to two single plans instead of a family plan as long as there are no dependents. College-age students may benefit from their School Health Plan and save you money as well. Once you quit working disability benefits, through your employer, may not be necessary. Private plans may give you coverage until age 65. If you are considering working a part-time job, consulting, etc. you may want to call your agent and discuss continuing your plan. Understand exactly what your coverage will be, when it will start, how much you will receive and the taxable nature of your coverage. For all of you looking to protect your lifestyle in retirement reviewing your life insurance and discussing long-term care insurance with an advisor would be very beneficial. Make sure any term life insurance held by your employer will still be a benefit for you after retirement. It usually decreases and becomes a nominal amount of coverage. Know it ahead of time. Make sure the amount will cover any existing debt, mortgage included. Long Term Care is nursing home coverage. Do not confuse this with the health care benefit of coverage for acute illnesses, often found in many health insurance benefits. Few companies include this new benefit for their employees, You will need to purchase these plans, privately. Many people feel that the expense for nursing home coverage is way too expensive. Unless you are on Medicaid, you could lose your home, your social security benefits, your pension and your income from annuities and retirement funds without Long Term Care Coverage. Protection of your lifestyle for yourself and your family are most important. There are Long Term Care benefits available through many agents and insurance companies. The New York State Partnership is one plan to consider because it initially, covers your admission to nursing homes, assisted living programs and many begin with home care coverage. The most important part of these plans is to make sure that the decisions for coverage begin with your doctor and not with the insurance company or their case managers. Nursing home costs today in our area average about $60-75,000 per year. Policies covering these costs usually include a 5% cost of living increase to keep pace with the growing inflationary costs of coverage. --------------------------------------------------------------------- Irene A. Majchrzak helps people retire debt-free with a sense of well-being and the freedom to have the things they want. Get her free ebook, Debt Free to Retire, by going to http://debtfreetoretire.com --- END ARTICLE --- Get HTML or TEXT Copy-and-Paste Versions Of This Article at: http://thePhantomWriters.com/free_content/db/m/protect-your-retirement.shtml#get_code ..................................... TERMS OF REPRINT - Publication Rules (Last Updated: May 11, 2006) Our TERMS OF REPRINT are fully enforcable under the terms of: The Digital Millennium Copyright Act http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c105:H.R.2281.ENR: ..................................... *** Digital Reprint Rights *** * If you publish this article in a website/forum/blog, You Must Set All URL's or Mailto Addresses in the body of the article AND in the Author's Resource Box as Hyperlinks (clickable links). * Links must remain in the form that we published them. Clean links should point to the Author's links without redirects having been inserted into the copy. * You are not allowed to Change or Delete any Words or Links in the Article or Resource Box. Paragraph breaks must be retained with articles. You can change where the paragraph breaks fall, but you cannot eliminate all paragraph breaks as some have chosen to do. * Email Distribution of this article Must be done through Opt-in Email Only. No Unsolicited Commercial Email. * You Are Allowed to format the layout of the article for proper display of the article in your website or in your ezine, so long as you can maintain the author's interests within the article. * You may not use sentences from this article as an input for any software that steals sentences from others in order to build an article with software. The copyright on this article applies to the "WHOLE" article. *** Author Notification *** We ask that you notify the author of publication of his or her work. Irene A. Majchrzak can be reached at: [email protected] *** Print Publication Reprint Rights *** If you desire to publish this article in a PRINT publication, you must contact the author directly for Print Permission at: mailto:[email protected] ..................................... If you need help converting this text article for proper hyperlinked placement in your webpage, please use this free tool: http://thephantomwriters.com/link-builder.pl ===================================================================== ABOUT THIS ARTICLE SUBMISSION http://thePhantomWriters.com is a paid article distribution service. thePhantomWriters.com and Article-Distribution.com are owned and operated by Bill Platt of Stillwater, Oklahoma USA. Learn more about our article distribution services by visiting: http://thephantomwriters.com/x.pl/tpw/info/article-distribution/index.html The content of this article is solely the property and opinion of its author, Irene A. 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