Quarterly Educational Seminar Series - What's My Number?

Our first seminar was "What's My Number?" It addressed an issue on most of our clients' minds: how much money do I need in order to retire? How much today? How much at retirement? How do I get there?

We reviewed some simple but useful rules of thumb. We showed the effect that spending has on your ability to retire, and offered a simple way to manage your spending that takes no time at all. We discussed whether a vacation home or expensive car is an asset or a liability (hint: it is only an asset if you are willing to sell it).

We reviewed life expectancy planning, including the role of Social Security income in your projections.

And last, but certainly not least, we discussed how diversification increases your financial security by reducing volatility and increasing predictability.

For those who attended the seminar, we welcome your feedback. We really do want this series to be helpful to our clients and community.

If you missed it, we'll offer it again. Please email us to notify you when we are going to do it again.

We ran out of time to walk through our "Envelope Budget", an easy way to take control of your spending.

The Envelope Budget:

1. Prepare a rough estimate of your spending for 2008.
2. Divide this number by 12 - this is your new monthly budget.
3. Set up an electronic funds transfer (EFT) for the monthly budgeted amount from your investment account to your checking account.
4. Evaluate in 3 months; if you had to transfer additional funds, then you're spending more than the budgeted amount; if you have funds accumulating in your checking account, then you are spending less than the monthly budgeted amount.
5. Revise your monthly budget if necessary.
6. Adjust the EFT to the revised budget.
7. If you want to reduce spending, reduce the EFT by 5%

And here is our budgeting worksheet, in Excel format.

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