Thursday, April 05, 2007

Doing the Numbers

There's been a fair amount of aisle chatter in my office of late regarding retirement, and the planning thereof. Part of this has been motivated by the rumour of organizational changes to come, and part of it is from a series of presentations that the company has started on the general topic of financial planning. Several of our people went to an on-site presentation, the first of several planned for the area; I'll be attending an on-line one in a few weeks. As a result, I likely will not get the pretty three-color handouts, but that's okay, as I assume they'll be available as PDFs (incidentally, re: PDFS-- check out Foxit Software's free PDF reader. Faster than Adobe. And free. ) so I can read them as needed. I did look at the material that one person brought back; much of it is very basic (possibly a nod to the idea that many people, even now, don't like to think about where their finances are, and even less about where they need to be) but some of it looks interesting, with some numbers and concepts that I didn't know or had not heard recently.

Yet, with all of that, I noted that when I told one of the attendees about the 'four per cent per year' concept (and I was careful to emphasize that this was a very rough cut), he asked me to walk through the example again, nodding as I did. Apparently, I'm not the only one who wants a quick, clean answer -- even if its not terribly reliable.

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