Given the current financial situation it is easy to give in to despair, to lose all hope and faith that you will ever be able to have a decent retirement. The absence of knowledge about your retirement options creates fear and hopelessness.

The antidote to despair and hopelessness is education. The more you know about your situation and your options the better you will feel about your financial future. To gain a personal sense of control over your future in retirement there are a number of topics in which you need to become better educated.

First and foremost you need to get a handle on how much money you will need in retirement. That involves you in determining what your basic and necessary living expenses will be in retirement. These expenses include food, housing, transportation, personal necessities (clothing, eye wear etc.), home/car insurance and medical care.

Once you have a solid handle on your basic living expenses you can then line up how much you have in income and savings, project a savings rate of return, and determine where you are on being able to cover the basic life necessities in your retirement.

X the big unknown factor for most people is projecting a rate of return on their savings. If you buy into the Wall Street game of stock picking and market timing it is almost impossible to predict future returns because of the uncertainty of future undervalued stocks to pick and markets to time. Using a passive investment strategy allows for more reliable return projections because the underlying investment strategy is fixed to the global rate of capital market return a real number with a real history.

The educated client is our best client because the more they know about how the market works the better investor they become. We offer a series of Investor Education Classes for our clients. The first one is free.