All posts by : Brandon Bell

There are three basic categories of investments: • moderate • conservative • aggressive Aggressive instruments are those primarily invested in for growth. As the chart shows, they include things such as common stocks, stock mutual funds, commodities, and speculative real estate. Again, these are typically invested in for growth or capital appreciation, not income. They are considered aggressive because, while they can provide large short-term gains, they can also cost the investor large, sudden losses.

Before you retire, you should know what all your various sources of income will be, and how much you can expect to receive from each. Obviously, Social Security benefits will be one of those sources, but how much you can expect to receive depends on many factors. There are ways to maximize your benefits and get the most that you’re entitled to, and there are strategies to minimize your tax burden from Social Security. The most important thing to consider in working toward those goals, however, is whether your Social Security benefits are coordinated properly with your other assets and sources of retirement income. We’ll address that shortly, but let’s begin with some basic facts about Social Security.

Nothing exists in a vacuum, meaning that even if you’ve determined the best time and method of taking your Social Security benefits based on your age, objectives, and lifelong earnings, it won’t matter unless you properly coordinate your benefits with your overall retirement income plan. Most people agree that Social Security is not enough to live on in retirement and needs to be supplemented with other sources of income. Therefore, it is essential to make sure your other savings and investment vehicles are as reliable as Social Security and capable of meeting the same financial objective: providing income that you can’t outlive.