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By your 50s, you should have some retirement savings. But is your balance as high as that of your peers? Read on to find out.
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You may be curious as to what other people in their 50s have saved for retirement. The average 50-something has a nest egg worth $110,900, according to Northwestern Mutual’s latest Planning & Progress Study.
Clearly, that’s not a negligible amount of money. But it’s also not a lot of money for retirement on a whole. So if you want to make sure your senior years are stress-free, it’s a balance you’ll definitely want to try to build on in the coming years.
You may want to try to ramp up
It’s hard to focus on retirement savings when life’s other bills, from car-related expenses to mortgage payments, eat up so much of your income. But the reality is that $110,900 isn’t a ton of money for retirement. You’ll want to make the most of the next 10 years or so to help ensure you can retire with more.
That may mean having to cut back on different expenses to ramp up your retirement plan contributions. And that could look like a lot of things. It could involve low-key, road trip-style vacations for the next several years instead of luxury ones. Or it could mean spending less money on your kids’ college tuition so you can bank more of it for yourself.
But let’s say you have $110,900 in retirement savings now and you want to end your career in 10 years. Let’s also assume you’re able to save $600 a month between now and then.
The stock market has, over the past 50 years, generated an average annual 10% return, as measured by the S&P 500. So if your portfolio delivers that same return, you’ll be looking at a total savings balance of around $402,000.
That could make for a comfortable retirement if you manage your savings well. And if you’re not super thrilled with that balance, you should know that delaying retirement by three years could mean amassing $559,000 instead, assuming that same $600 monthly contribution and 10% return during those extra three years.
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Of course, one thing to note about that 10% return is that it may be a bit aggressive for your pre-retirement years, since near-retirees are often advised to start shifting away from stocks and replacing them with safer investments, like bonds. But if you’re 10 years away from retirement and you shift toward safer assets within three years of that milestone, you might end up with a higher return some of those years, so 10% is not such an unreasonable figure to work with.
What if you don’t even have $110,900 saved for retirement yet?
It may be that your IRA or 401(k) has a lot less money than $110,900 at present. If that’s the case, and you don’t want to be cash-strapped in retirement, you should probably do two things:
Cut back on spending a lot in the coming years to save and invest as much as you can.Delay retirement so you can save more and leave your nest egg untouched a bit longer.
Let’s say you have $50,000 in retirement savings at age 55. If you’re willing to retire at age 70 and are able to sock away $800 a month for retirement savings purposes between now and then, you’ll end up with about $514,000, assuming an average annual 10% return on your investments.
Your 50s are a time to really buckle down on the retirement savings front — especially if you’re not so thrilled with the state of your nest egg. The good news is that you still have options, and you may have higher earnings that allow you to contribute more to your IRA or 401(k) than you’ve done in the past. Push yourself to do that for the sake of being able to retire comfortably.
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