Any advice for a newbie trying to plan for retirement?

Anyone who hasn’t retired yet here is just doing their best guesswork. Myself including.

In the past, there is no excel, so how those old people who retired comfortably plan?

After interviewing a few of them, the common thing they did is to first plan out, as precisely as you can, how you want your retirement to be. Investing for returns is not everything (granted they did undergo an era of growth in Singapore where bank interest rates is 5%!)

Then, go and discover the various ways to generate income streams for you. Considering now we are undergoing a pandemic, maybe you want to include an income stream that will not be sensitive to such situations.

In the first step, you planned how much you need, so now, do a simple projection based on your current efforts (investments/salary/savings) and find out how much you will end up with.

Then either adjust your retirement lifestyle or have more inputs into current efforts to meet your retirement lifestyle. This exercise is about managing expectations.

Anything that is measured will improve so keep that in mind. The best battle strategy in a war will not work if the military assets is not able to achieve the multiple campaigns in the battle plan.

I did write an article about this, there is a tracker inside to help do some projections based on your current assets.

Had previously written an article on this topic, retirement is all about managing expectations.

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W

I wish I had done this earlier, so I'm sharing this with you now: You might want to get this Net Worth tracking excel sheet by Kyith from the Investment Moats.

https://investmentmoats.com/wealth-building-2/d...

If your net worth (including investments) is increasing month after month, it's satisfying to know that you're in the right direction. If it is the opposite (i.e. decreasing), it will push you to think where you have gone off the mark.

Tracking expenses will also allow you to see how much are the essentials (needs) and non-essentials (wants) that you are spending each month. It is important to know, so that you can plan how much you may require for retirement.

I use this from Gracia. She lives in Europe so it's in EUR but there's no issue in adapting it for SG use. You can update your expenses on-the-go easily, since the file is in the cloud.

https://medium.com/google-sheets-geeks/how-to-e...

Hope this helps!