How To Preserve Wealth When Retired

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Reaching that stage of life when you're considering retirement is a big step. Thinking about your retirement plans, your ongoing investment management and even setting up your will can be daunting tasks to undertake.

One of the most important things to consider before reaching this milestone is wealth preservation – how you will preserve wealth to enjoy during retirement and for your future generations. This guide will explain how wealth preservation works and take you through the best wealth preservation strategies to put in place before you reach full retirement.

What Is Wealth Preservation? 

Wealth preservation involves using strategies to grow your personal assets for the purpose of providing a financial legacy for your family and future generations.

There are a variety of ways that you can grow and preserve both your personal and family wealth, including in-depth investment management, comprehensive financial planning and having a diversified portfolio of assets.

Why Is Wealth Preservation Important? 

Developing wealth preservation strategies is integral to building generational wealth, and preserving your legacy with your next of kin. Building and preserving wealth means that your family will inherit no debt (from guarantor loans or joint accounts), taxes or financial problems, creating less of a risk of financial anxiety for the future.

On top of this, wealth preservation can provide a stable and dependable income for you to rely on once you decide to retire. Having passive income streams and a reliable investment strategy already in place means that there is no need to feel worried or pressured by your finances. Financial freedom means that you can focus on enjoying your retirement.

Generating Wealth Vs Preserving Wealth 

There is a difference between generating or building wealth and wealth preservation. Building or creating wealth is something that must be initiated at the beginning of your working life. This is done through accruing a steady amount of savings and assets such as an investment portfolio.

Preserving wealth requires a starting point of financial stability, achieved through savings, investments and personal assets. Wealth preservation involves keeping your already built wealth at the same level or higher, through developing a solid financial plan and investment strategies.

The main difference between growing and preserving is the action that is taken. While growing wealth is primarily an active task and done through working for an income, wealth preservation is achieved mainly through monitoring, planning and strategizing.

Wealth Creation

The main ways wealth is created and sustained throughout a lifetime is through accumulating savings, investments and diverse assets. These all require working for an income, and using your earned money to wisely invest and advance your financial standing.

If you are considering how you may begin to build wealth, it is important to consider these three strategies and think about the following:

Savings 

Savings are the most important factor to building a solid base from which you can develop other assets and investments. The best way to increase your savings is to start to accumulate savings early. This should be begun by setting up a savings account and having realistic financial goals.

Savings are the most necessary input for success in your financial future. After gaining a reliable amount of savings, you can then begin to work on other wealth creation strategies, such as investing in real estate, shares and other assets.

Investments 

After saving a reliable amount, you can look into investments as your next way to build wealth. This can include buying property or real estate, bonds and stocks or shares. An investment also includes setting up a life insurance policy and superannuation.

It is important to place focus on dependable, low-risk investments that can steadily rise over the years you invest in them.

When considering these investments, getting expert advice from a financial advisor is always a great idea. Taking the time to research each possible investment, and the trends in the current market is a good strategy to ensure a low-risk, high-reward investment.

The ASR Investing Report allows you to get all of your information in one place, with educational resources, daily and monthly financial newsletters and frequent share recommendations from highly-reputable advisors.

Diverse Assets 

After beginning to develop your investments and assets, it's important to ensure you are broadening and diversifying your portfolio.

Having different real estate investments such as leased-out buildings, a family home and possibly a holiday house is a great way to diversify your owned property. For share investments, making sure to choose a number of different options, such as exchange traded funds (ETFs) or even Cryptocurrencies are a great way to vary your assets.

This will ensure that your money is not invested in one single place or type, and if there is any risk of a market crash, your investments remain safe and dependable. This strategy also allows you to have a passive income stream that can continue throughout retirement.

At ASR, we take diversifying your investment portfolio seriously, and our wealth investment advisors will always take your ideas for additional assets into account.

Wealth Preservation Strategies

After growing your wealth over your working life, reaching retirement might seem like a big step. When finishing up earning an income, this is the time to consider the wealth preservation strategies you will take to continue your financial legacy in the future.

Both a successful retirement plan and financial future for the next generation relies on using the following strategies:

Extensive Financial Planning

Financial planning is key to successfully preserving wealth for both retirement and future generations. Taking into account your lifestyle, living expenses and liquid assets, your retirement plan can be based on the comprehensive financial planning you create for wealth preservation purposes.

Having financial advisors is always recommended when beginning your wealth preservation journey, as they can help decide which wealth preservation strategies will work best for your future wealth management. When setting up your financial plan, it is extremely important to cover these three steps:

1. Family Wealth And Inheritance

Within your financial plan, it's important to begin considering your family's wealth and financial future.

If you have assets such as a privately owned business or property, you will need to work out which next-of-kin or family member will take on these responsibilities. Financial responsibility is an extremely important part of financial planning, especially if you have significant wealth that you pass down after death.

You can begin this part of financial planning by educating your children, family and next of kin about your personal finances and teach them about financial responsibility. This can be achieved by enlisting the help of a financial advisor.

2. Asset Allocation

After considering your family and how they will take on the responsibility of wealth management, you can begin asset allocation and decide who will take on managing the family's wealth, which involves further wealth creation and wealth preservation.

Allocating your real estate, savings, share and other assets to specific people will help you work out how wealth can be preserved for future generations. This in turn will aid generational wealth to thrive within your family.

3. Estate Planning

Finally, creating an estate plan is the last step in financial planning that will help with your wealth preservation process. Setting up your will and estate plan, with your asset allocation clearly outlined is key to your financial planning.

Within your estate planning, you can look into how you can improve the financial situation for your beneficiaries. Making sure your life insurance, long-term care insurance and funeral insurance policies are properly set up is a great way to reduce financial anxiety.

A good wealth preservation strategy for estate planning would be to give assets to low-income family members, as their capital gains tax will be lowered in accordance with their low tax rate. This kind of wealth management is great to reduce tax burden, debts and money troubles for your family's future.

Asset Consolidation

After your financial plan is fully established, you should make sure all your information about your assets and investments is easily accessible. A great way to do this is by consolidating your assets.

This means choosing one financial advisor or institution to look after and provide protection for all of your investments. You can still maintain a diverse portfolio, but it will be kept all in one place, for dependable safe-keeping and easy access.

Risk Management 

The final wealth preservation strategy is to mitigate risk with your already established assets. Developing a diverse portfolio is one way your risk tolerance is maintained.

The best strategy for risk management is to keep up to date with investment news and constantly monitor the status of your investments. Although these assets, especially in retirement, are considered a passive income stream, it's important to stay on top of current news and trends that may affect your investments.

Some of these financial risks include:

• • • Capital gains tax
    • Market volatility
    • Inflation
    • Changes in interest rates

Of course, depending on a reliable financial advisor for information is a great risk management strategy. Other strategies for keeping up to date include reading investment news regularly, educating yourself on new trends or concepts and subscribing to a reporting service that will provide data analytics on your current investments.

ASR has a great service for both income and investing reporting, and has a wealth of knowledge in all the current market trends and possible financial risks to avoid.

Overall, wealth preservation comes down to lots of planning, monitoring and consideration of the future. While it may seem daunting, retirement and preserving wealth for the future is not a difficult task to undertake, especially with help from a financial advisor.

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