How can retirement software help you?

Retirement software can help you and your family to manage your retirement assets and accounts whether they are 401ks, mutual funds, annuities, or any other financial product. It can be nearly impossible to evaluate all of your assets when their performance comes in separate confusing reports. So stop trying to manage it all yourself!

Using retirement software allows you to visualize your entire retirement in a single complete picture by adding up the constituent parts for you. In addition to viewing the performance of your currents assets this software can be useful for evaluating the performance of new assets you may be considering for your portfolio. Retirement planning will be much less of a headache when you understand the consequences of the products and decisions involved.

What to look for in retirement software?

You want software that will be able to handle all of your assets, not just add together the interest rates of two investments. Furthermore, the software should be visual. Even if a software gives a complete picture of all of your retirement funds it does not matter if the data it gives cannot be understood by you, the end user. Look for software that shows you a graph or other visual instead of just values and rates at different years in the future. This will make your retirement process much less painful. It is also very important to get a software package that understands you may not know everything there is to know about your investments and accounts. Look for a software that advertises a simple process to add your account information and doesn’t have 40 jargon filled confusing questions about your different assets. Retirement is a long term goal so you need to sure your software will continue to work for you from now until you actually retire. If you have a financial advisor but still want to keep track of everything yourself then your advisor may be a good resource as many retirement planners and financial advisors use software to visualize their clients’ accounts. This software may be professional grade and therefore more expensive and advanced but many companies offer a more user friendly version for individuals.

Using retirement software

It doesn’t matter how great and feature packed your software is if you don’t use it. So take the time one day to type in all the necessary details of your retirement accounts so the software can actually give you an idea of your retirement. Don’t leave out your 401k or anything else as then you have the same problem before of having to manage your total assets yourself in your head and there won’t have been any point in buying the software to begin with.

Once you have this information collected into the program you have to choose to do something about it. This can be hard as it means taking an honest look at your financial situation as it pertains to retirement. How are you doing? Do you need to save more? Do you need to move some of your stocks and mutual funds into bonds? What about your 401k? Are you maxing out your contribution? If so, that’s okay but make sure you have a good reason why not.

 

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