An important thing to remember during this pandemic is that it’s just a temporary situation at best and in time,  it will certainly pass. Patience is an important quality to develop right now. Approaching retirement means we need to keep alert to the effects of sensational journalism that dwells on catastrophic news to sell more media, those stories can make us get stuck in the ‘what-if’ questions. The last thing we need to do at this time is to have a knee-jerk reaction to our financial planning and therefore make choices that could negatively impact on our future well-being. 

Because of the recent events you no doubt are wondering if what you had planned will still be relevant, giving you the financial stability you expected to have in retirement. Many of us rely on accessing our Pension fund or Superannuation to fund our retirement and it’s clear that the markets have taken a huge hit recently and this has upset many people and being worried is only natural.

5 Options to Help You Get Back On Track

There are some options here to consider that might help to get things back on track so it’s not all bad news because there’s always another way to go:

Option 1 – you can consider boosting your funds with extra payments, boosting contributions at this point can make an immediate difference to those approaching retirement age.

Option 2 – consider delaying when you expect to retire. Of course this means working longer but it will also allow your savings to recover to a pre- coronavirus status.

Option 3 – speak with your financial advisors about a reverse mortgage. This allows access to your property equity without an outright sale.

Option 4 – make some lifestyle adjustments as to your expectations of how you wish to lead your days after retirement. Small adjustments can offset the result of diminishing returns on your invested funds.

Option 5 – look at selling assets that have up to now been considered important or necessary.

Many of us simply want to hang onto our quality of life the best way we know-how, we can do all we can to weigh up all the factors related to adjusting to this virus, talking to our advisors, looking at the size of our balances, the time until we actually retire and our expenditure forecasts etc…..but, we must not forget the lessons learnt during this pandemic that it’s family, our friends and the community that surrounds us that plays an equally important part of our overall mental health and well-being. We need to practice ageing, after all, it’s a transformative process that requires us to keep actively engaged for as long as we possibly can. Nothing will be taken away as we age, we only continue to add to the richness of our lives by being more of who we are than less. We don’t have to be afraid of choice, we only need to keep on exploring all the way up to the very summit.

Want to dig deeper : read my blog on “whats behind the pandemic curtain”