Lahti, Lahti & O'Neill, P.C. Blog

By Stephen T. O’Neill

Most of Lahti, Lahti & O'Neill, P.C.’s clients are pretty well situated in terms of having saved enough for retirement. But even if you count yourselves as part of that group, you may still be uncertain about the following:

• How to optimize tax-deferred stretch-out of retirement plan distributions for yourself and your loved ones.

• Whether your IRA and Qualified Retirement Plan beneficiary designations are set up in a way that optimally achieves the unfortunately often conflicting goals of income tax deferral and estate tax minimization.
• Whether IRA and Qualified Retirement Plan death benefits should be made payable outright to your beneficiaries, or instead be left in trust for one or more, or perhaps even all of such beneficiaries.

Each estate plan we craft for our clients deals with the above issues among many others. However, Retirement Distribution Planning is really a moving target, due to changing laws and regulations, shifting values of clients’ assets, and clients’ propensity to move retirement plan accounts from one custodian or manager to another. Therefore, just as your overall estate plan should be reviewed at least every three-to-five years, your retirement planning should be reviewed at least that often. 

A related issue…

If you have reached retirement age or are approaching it, you may also be wondering whether you have accumulated enough in terms of IRAs, Qualified Retirement Plans, Social Security benefits and other resources to enjoy a comfortable retirement.

If, on the other hand, you have many years to go before you reach retirement age, you may be (should be!) wondering whether you are accumulating enough in terms of IRAs, Qualified Retirement Plans, Social Security benefits and other resources to enjoy a comfortable retirement.

Frankly, you don't need a lawyer to help you determine if you have saved or will have saved enough to comfortably retire. Any capable financial advisor can help you with these issues. In fact you can get a leg up on addressing the issues by using an online resource such as the AARP Retirement Calculator, which you can find here.  Perhaps even better, you can go to AARP’s home page and click on “Work and Retirement/Retirement Planning” and explore all of the resources there. They include a Retirement Calculator, which you can find by scrolling down in the left margin.