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Our focus has to shift from having a big pile of savings into what type of income that our savings will create.
I don’t know if you have ever worked in a pizza place, but if you have, you know one of the jobs of the drivers, before leaving for the night, is to prep the dough for the next day.
This involves reaching into the stock in the freezer, removing the frozen dough, and placing it in a pan, to thaw and prepare for use.
It’s a calculated process, reaching into the known amount of the frozen dough and pulling out both enough to sustain the unknown need for the next day and preserve enough backstock to keep enough dough to support the future need.
And as I thought back to my days, long ago, as a driver, greasing the pans, pulling the dough and spinning the disc before readying it for use, I thought about how the same concept applies to finances, and specifically, to the process for transitioning your money from savings to use in retirement.
As we transition from our working years where we are saving money, into deploying that money--prepping for use, we need a plan in place so that the system continues to support itself, and we can create the opportunity to have our money outlive us, rather than the other way around.
But to do this, our focus has to shift from having a big pile of savings into what type of income that our savings will create--and what guarantees go along with that.
Once removed from the freezer, the pizza can’t go back into being surplus anymore. Its purpose has shifted from stock that you have to stock that must be used, and this is the same with readying your piles of savings to transition into money that will pay you through retirement.
The concern goes from how much do we have to what are we putting into use and in what ways?
And when we start needing an income from our savings, that is something that is best planned for ahead of time, so we know just how much to use when and where.
Of all the fortune 500 companies in this country, only 7 of them offer a pension. But, if you ask most people if they’d want one, they say, of course. What if you could create your own?
For the most part, a guaranteed income that you can’t outlive is not something you can count on, but if you create a situation you can count on, it is.
Kelechukwu “Chu” Oparah is a Licensed Financial Professional Serving your Dayton Community. For more content, Chu is on Instagram @chuoparah.