How to retire: Morningstar expert tackles five scary questions

By Chris Taylor

NEW YORK – If you find it hard to plan for retirement, here is a little secret: It is hard for everyone – even the world’s foremost experts on the topic.

Take Christine Benz, for example. As the longtime director of personal finance and retirement planning for investment research firm Morningstar, Benz knows pretty much everything there is to know on the subject.

But when her own father started experiencing cognitive decline, she assumed financial responsibilities for her parents – and was swarmed with hundreds of retirement-related challenges one cannot fully understand until experienced. 

“It was a best-case scenario for them: Someone aligned with their interests, helping them sort things out,” Benz says. “But not everyone has that. A lot of investors out there are really worried about embarking on this process without any help at all.”

These lessons shaped a new book, “How to Retire: 20 Lessons for a Happy, Successful, and Wealthy Retirement”.

The books draws on in-depth interviews with 20 personal finance experts, including chapters with bestselling authors like Ramit Sethi (“Give Yourself Permission To Spend on What Matters To You”) and Jean Chatzky (“What Women Need To Do Differently”).

Benz also distills her career in the personal-finance field into these five main pointers:

BE WILLING TO ENTERTAIN DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVES

Unfortunately, there is no one “right” answer on retirement questions – even when Benz talks to the most distinguished experts around.

“Annuities are a great example,” she says. “Some say they should be under consideration, and others recoil at their very mention.”

Age is another sticking point. While some people might want to retire at 60, others might want to work until 75 or 80. Neither of those goals is “correct,” per se. Everyone’s situation is unique and so are retirement plans.

DO NOT BE AFRAID TO BE A WEIRDO

Retirement can be a very long period, of 20 or even 30 years. So approaching a gigantic life phase purely based on what others expect, or how others have done it in the past, is generally a bad idea.

If something that makes you happy strikes others as pretty odd, well – so be it.

“Don’t do it the way your parents did it, or how your neighbors are doing it,” says Benz. “Try a little bit of this and a little bit of that. Don’t conform to whatever your peers are doing.”

FORGET OPTIMIZATION

Contrary to what you have been led to believe, retirement is not strictly a math equation. You are not going to find happiness by tweaking some asset allocation here and reducing a transaction cost there.

Those things are all well and good, but retirement is about emotional needs as well as financial – maybe more than 50%, Benz says. One example: Perhaps stock market gyrations make you extremely nervous.

“From an optimization standpoint, having some cash in your portfolio means that your total returns won’t be as high,” she says. “But if that helps you sleep at night, then that’s still a sound financial plan.”

EXPERIMENT

No one can predict their ideal retirement ahead of time. Living in Portugal or Costa Rica sounds like a great idea – although you could end up hating it. How can you possibly know? By trying it out.

“I love the idea of dabbling in lots of things,” says Benz, who booked a month-long rental in Florida with her husband last winter, to see if that arrangement might work for them in future. She ended up missing her friends and family back home in Chicago.

“Delve into different hobbies. Try different volunteer activities. Go to different geographic locales. Ideally, you try things out before you commit,” Benz says.

FIND YOUR ‘MICRO-JOYS’

Most people have a bucket list of things they have always wanted to achieve in life, such as visiting Peru’s Machu Picchu or taking a cruise to see the glaciers in Alaska.

Retirement does not have to be about things that are so grandiose (and expensive). After all, most of your retirement is not going to be spent on a big trip.

“When I think about activities that are the most memorable in life, often they have no cost at all,” Benz notes. “Retirement can also be about day-to-day pleasures, like friends sitting around a table and sharing a meal together.”