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Today, I have some advice for those of you heading into retirement or already into retirement and have realized that, for whatever reason, whether it was an unforeseen or medical expense or just a lack of excess income after all the expenses of taking care of your family or whether you just didn’t pay attention to saving until it was too late.

My theme for you continues to be “Yes, you can retire and live twice the life at half the cost”. You just have to be smart about it”.

Now here’s my advice… if, after adding up all you’ve saved for retirement, you find that your income won’t be enough to support you, start to actively look for ways to trim your expenses. This way you can keep more of the income you are set to receive, enabling you to live the life you’ve always dreamed of but could not afford.

Today, I want to share some of my favorite suggestions and add a few I picked up from an article titled 7 Realistic Strategies for Retirement by Tom Sightings, for U.S. News & World Report.

First, remember there are only two ways to get to your destination. Using a boating metaphor, you either raise the bridge or lower the water. Raising the bridge means earning more income. Lowering the water means cutting your expenses. Only you know which choice is the most feasible for you but today I am going to talk about ideas which “lower the water”.

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How much money should I withdraw annually from my portfolio when I retire?

I get that question a lot from friends and family. (Occupational hazard.) It’s also one of the most hotly debated issues in financial planning. Why? First, it’s important; we all hope to live happily in retirement. Second, every person’s situation is unique, so there’s no standard set of spending assumptions for retirement planning. Third, market returns may be mean-reverting over long time periods, but a person’s retirement happens over a specific time period, parts of which may deviate significantly from longer-term average returns that are used to forecast future asset values.

Let’s start with why the question is so critical. Ideally, you’ve been saving for four to five decades to build your nest egg. Now that you’ve stopped working, you want to use that hard-earned money for daily expenses, health care and the things you wanted to do while you were working — like taking a month-long African safari. But you also want to make sure your money lasts until you or your spouse dies, whichever comes later. Often, you want it to last even longer: Many people hope to pass along some of their assets to their children, grandchildren and other loved ones.

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