Hey everybody
Brice Carter your favorite FSG advisor
here, wanted to talk about another big
myth that I hear about during retirement
or leading up to retirement and that's 
that you're gonna spend less during retirement
Now my colleague Ronnie
Thompson talked specifically about how
you may end up actually paying more in
taxes during retirement than you are
when you're working and I would agree
with that statement but, additionally we
find that there's three phases of
retirement and they can often lead,
depending on which phase, you spending
more in retirement. Practically speaking
there are three stages of retirement-
there's early retirement, in which we
call often active retirement. Now you
you're fresh off your off the job maybe
you have some free time, you
have your health, and you want to do some
traveling, you want to see the grandkids, you
want to take a trip across the country,
during this early active stage or
retirement it's not uncommon to see
people spend 110 percent of what they
were spending in an annual basis during
their working years, which means you're
actually spending more than what you
were when you were working, therefore, the
income need is greater, and therefore, the
planning is critical. After the early
stage retirement we're often spending a
lot of money traveling, there's the
middle stage retirement, which you're
kind of settling and getting in the
groove of retirement, maybe you downsize
the home and maybe you got a lot of
those maybe home projects done, maybe you
got those trips out of the way.
During this middle stage retirement it's
not uncommon for us to see people spend
the same amount that they were during
retirement or during what their working
years or maybe even a little bit less.
After the middle stage retirement of
course comes the late stage retirement
now this can involve one of two things
either your health is good and you're
not spending very much money because you
just don't feel like traveling or doing
home projects or it can be the
alternative if your health takes a turn
for the worst. Late stage retirement can
actually be the most expensive period of
your life, between assisted care living,
medical costs, all those kind of things
add up to where it could be a very
expensive phase towards the end of your
retirement. Now we want to do is make
sure we're being constructive about
planning for this phase, during the
earlier phases of retirement, so the
retirement planning doesn't stop when
you retire, it continues throughout the plan.
