It’s always fun/amusing/uncomfortable when you get to discuss your eventual death. I had the great fortune to experience that last week. Lisa and I met with our new financial planner. He was showing us all the projections for when we could retire and how much we’d have. Then he told us the projections were based on me living for 80 years and Lisa living for 85. That wasn’t so bad, I already knew the average female outlives the average male.
So we started going through the “Retirement Income Projection” he whipped up for us. That’s when it moved into the “amusing” phase:
Your retirement income need is assumed to increase each year by the estimated average inflation rate. This need is assumed to decrease by 20% at Ryan’s death.
I actually laughed at this. Then he showed us a chart that related “Retirement Income” (how much we’d be living off of per year during retirement) to the year. In other words, it’s a graph indicating how inflation increases your cost of living year over year. The funny part about this graph is that you see the amount drop by 20% in 2057. He pointed to that drop and said, “this is where Ryan dies.”
Didn’t anybody ever tell this guy that he should never tell a procrastinator they still have 53 years to do everything they need to?