Meet with a fee-only financial planner

Time is of the essence and in this particular case, this is the best time to meet a professional and make sure you haven’t left something important out of your retirement strategy. Even if you are quite skilled in managing your own investments, there’s no harm in having talks with a fee-only financial planner two heads, on this occasion, really can be better than one.

The reason a fee-only financial planner is better because they charge an hourly fee with no commissions or products to push onto you. They can evaluate your finances and review your numbers and plans in a fair and objective manner.

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Use retirement calculators

By your 50s, you should have a pretty good idea of how your income will look like in your golden years. To that extent, you could use online retirement calculators to estimate the monthly or annual income expected from your savings and other financial sources.

Online calculators might not be the most accurate calculation tools out there, with results varying from one calculator to another, but they can still help you set your financial targets and objectives and reveal potential gaps between your expected income and potential expenses in retirement.

One quite efficient calculator is ESPlannerBASIC, developed by Laurence Kotlikoff, the president of Economic Security Planning Inc. and economics professor at Boston University. Other free calculators include:

• The AARP Retirement Calculator
• The Flexible Retirement Planner from Random Walk Ventures
• Vanguard Group’s Retirement Nest Egg Calculator

See also 13 Key Money-Management Tips Every Retiree Should Know.