Building Your Retirement Plan: Assessing Your Current Financial Situation

Welcome to the Freedom Nation podcast with Jeff Kikel. On this show, Jeff shares his expertise in financial and retirement planning from a different perspective. Planning for Your Freedom Day, which is the first day that you wake up and have enough income or assets and do not have to go to work that day. Learn how to calculate what you need, how to generate income sources, and listen to interviews from others who've done it themselves get ready to experience your own Freedom Day.

Hey Freedom Nation Welcome back to the channel where financial freedom is more than a finish line. Now, my name is Jeff Kikel. I'm the host of the Freedom Nation podcast, and today we're going to discuss step two of building a retirement plan for early retirement, assessing your current financial situation. Now, knowing where you stand financially is essentially building a retirement plan that meets your needs. So let's dive in.

Step one, you're going to calculate your net worth. Now calculating your net worth is the first step and assessing your current financial situation. This involves adding up all your assets, including your savings, investments, property, anything that you own, including businesses, and then subtracting liabilities such as debt or mortgages from there. Now your net worth is a snapshot of your financial health, and will help you determine how much you need to save to retire early.

Now step two of the process is you're going to evaluate your current savings and investment accounts. After calculating your net worth, the next step is evaluating your current savings and investment accounts. Make a list of all your retirement accounts such as 401, Ks and IRAs, any annuities, you have any taxable accounts and determine how much you've saved. Then you need to evaluate the performance of your investments and compare them to benchmarks to determine if your investments are performing well. And if they're going to be performing at a high enough rate to be able to meet your goals.

Step three, you're going to evaluate your current and future income sources. So after looking at your savings and investments, the next step, you're going to evaluate those future income sources. By considering factors such as pensions, Social Security benefits, rental income business income, you're going to estimate how much income you'll receive from all the sources and how much or how long those streams will last.

Then at step four, you're going to identify any gaps. So you're going to look at your current situation, you're going to look at your estimated retirement expenses, and projected retirement income. If the income falls short, you may need to adjust your retirement goals, increase your savings rate. Or find other sources of cash flow to bridge the gap. Maybe you're going to invest in real estate or something that can create some extra cash flow. So once you've assessed your your current financial situation, it's critical to building that plan for retirement by calculating your net worth and evaluating your savings and investment accounts and identifying gaps in the plan. You'll have a clearer picture of your financial health what you need to do to retire early. Now don't forget to subscribe to our channel for more financial tips and advice. And as always, we love comments, so please make some comments below here. Make sure you subscribe and I will see you right back here the next time was step number three.