When discussing retirement planning, it’s crucial to prepare for the most significant expenses you’ll be facing. While you can control some of these, one cost that will only get higher is healthcare. Unfortunately, as you get older, your body will require more maintenance and upkeep, which can lead to more hospital visits, medications, and other treatments.  

To ensure that you’re ready for rising healthcare costs, we want to outline the best way to plan for them during retirement. Whether you’re going to retire in a few years or a few decades, it’s never too soon (or too late) to prepare. Here’s what you need to know. 

Remember when saving for retirement used to be so easy? Yea, I don’t either because I wasn’t alive back then. However, if you were, all you had to do was work 40 years at your employer, get your pension and social security and then sail off into the retirement sunset.

Today, on the other hand, it's a totally different story. It now basically falls completely on your shoulders. There are so many questions. How much should I save in my 401k? What do I even invest in? What about a Roth IRA? The list can go on and on. Let's take it step-by-step to get you moving in the right direction so you can get to retirement – or what I like to call financial independence – sooner rather than later.

Now that the holidays are over, it’s back to reality. For many – hopefully, not you – it means paying off all the debts you racked up from your extremely generous giving. Let’s just hope you had already budgeted for it and you were merely using your credit card to get the free rewards.

Regardless of whether you have debt or not, sometimes, unknowns pop up in our lives where we need to get access to money. If you don’t have it sitting in a savings account – which I’m sure you do if you’re an avid reader of this blog – you have to find it somewhere.

No matter how old you are, it’s never too late to start thinking about retirement. Although you will want to put money away in a variety of different accounts, one of the most reliable is an IRA. You may already be familiar with Traditional and Roth IRAs, but the fact is there is a way to move money from a Traditional to a Roth, which is considered a Backdoor Roth IRA or a Roth Conversion.

Both actually do the same thing in a slightly different way. A Backdoor Roth IRA is typically in relation to converting a Traditional non-deductible contribution to a Roth IRA. A Roth Conversion is normally in relation to a larger amount being converted from a Traditional to a Roth. Again, they both do the same thing but just have different names. Today, we’re going to focus on the Backdoor Roth IRA.

For many individuals, the primary concern is to save as much money as they can before retirement. After all, the bigger your nest egg, the less likely you’ll run out. 

However, even if your retirement accounts are bursting at the seams, budgeting is still a necessity. In many cases, without a budget, you could wind up having to dust off the old resume because your funds are starting to run low. 

As a financial advisor, I meet with individuals and couples who hope to retire early all the time - I mean, who doesn’t. Once I sit down with them for some basic number-crunching, we work together to create a long-term financial plan that will guide many of their decisions. 

This can include how much to invest, when and where to invest, and ways to increase cash flow and returns while keeping long-term costs and taxes to a minimum. 

The average person needs between 70 and 80 percent of their income each year when they retire. If you have that already saved, you're probably in good shape. 

However, there's always more you can do to help you stretch your retirement funds without sacrificing your quality of life. It just takes planning and know-how.

First of all, congratulations that you are able to max out your 401k. Whether it’s $18,000 if you are under 50 years old or $24,000 if you’re over 50, that is a lot of money to sock away on an annual basis.

Now that we have established you're contributing the max, the next question I ask is do you receive matching contributions from your employer? If the answer is yes, another congratulations are in order because not all employers provide a company match.