The Endless Vacation

Many families are enjoying their summer vacations this month.  As the summer comes to a close and students begin to head back to school, parents thoughts may leap ahead to thinking about a time in the future when vacation won’t end.

Will you be prepared for the endless vacation?  Will you be prepared for the day when you are no longer able, or simply no longer desire to work for a living and will need to rely on your nest egg, social security, and if you are of the lucky few, a pension payment?

The sooner you can begin to make plans for the eventual endless vacation, the better prepared you will be to afford a comfortable and enjoyable standard of living.  But you must begin to make plans now.   Time is your secret weapon in the fight to accumulate sufficient funds to afford the lifestyle to which you are accustomed.  Time, patience and faith are the building blocks for success in investing.

How will you turn your retirement nest egg into an ever growing income stream that you cannot outlive?  You have spent years working and setting aside some of your income just for this purpose.  But you need a plan and a process that will ensure that you don’t make any major mistakes with this most serious nest egg.  A consistent process utilizing a proper asset allocation between stocks, bonds and cash  - or mutual funds holding them, diversification and conservative withdrawal rate has proven over time to provide a lifetime income stream that you cannot outlive.

The help of a professional Certified Financial Planner who will place your interest ahead of all others, and will put this in writing to you, can be a most valuable asset in the planning and success of funding your endless vacation.  Their services to optimize your results and avoid costly mistakes could be the difference between endless vacation and back-to-work.  So much the better if they will work with you on a fee-only basis thereby avoiding conflicts of interest from sales commissions, higher than necessary product fees, and back-door payments to their firms for product placement.

An endless vacation can be the realization of a life-long dream.  Commit to making a plan and the long-term care and feeding of that plan.  If you do, the world will be your playground and your vacation can be full of wonder and adventure.