A practical approach to retirement planning

According to many surveys of individual's financial goals, the vast majority of North Americans wish to retire prior to age 65. The problem is, very few individuals have a documented plan and savings pattern that will allow them to achieve the goal of early retirement. This paper presents and describes a retirement planning model and provides a computer template based on the model. This model is used to determine the real dollar amount of wealth required at the point of retirement to fund an individual's or household's lifestyle during retirement. It then determines the yearly or monthly savings required between now and retirement to accumulate the required wealth. With the model, the sensitivity of the required savings to changes in some or all of the key variables can be easily determined.