Write a Retirement Strategy

Do you have retirement savings strategy? Do your employees?

The 17th Annual Transamerica Retirement Survey of Workers lists a broad range of factors to include in a written retirement savings strategy. A basic strategy includes plotting out retirement income needs, projected costs and expenses and risk factors.

However, only 16 percent of the nearly 4,200 U.S. workers surveyed said they had a written retirement strategy. Forty-seven percent said they had an unwritten strategy.

Of those who said they had a written or unwritten strategy, here are the percentages that included the following key factors:

• Social Security and Medicare benefits (55 percent);
• ongoing living expenses (52 percent);
• savings and income needs (52 percent);
• total retirement savings and income needs (49 percent);
• healthcare costs (46 percent)
• plan to ensure savings last throughout retirement (40 percent);
• investment returns (37 percent);
• inflation (37 percent);
• pursuing retirement dreams (27 percent);
• long-term care insurance (27 percent);
• tax planning (21 percent);
• estate planning (19 percent); and
• contingency plans for retiring sooner than expected and/or for savings shortfalls (14 percent).

What percentage of your employees do you think have a written retirement savings strategy that includes these critical factors? If your credit union works with retirement planning advisors and/or has information and tools employees can use to create a comprehensive written plan including the critical factors, be sure to promote these resources regularly.

Tom Eckert is a vice president at CUESolutions Platinum provider CUNA Mutual Retirement Solutions, Madison, Wis. Reach him at tom.eckert@cunamutual.com. Learn more about CUESolutions by emailing kari@cues.org.