Use This Year-End Checklist to Stay on Track With Your Retirement Savings Goals

The end of the year offers a perfect opportunity to evaluate your progress toward retirement savings goals. Below, you'll find tips to help ensure you're making the most of your resources as we approach 2025. 

1. Reassess Your Savings Strategy 

Retirement savings goals are deeply personal, varying significantly based on the lifestyle you envision. Additionally, the retirement saving strategies that may have worked for you 10, 20, or 30 years ago may need to be reassessed at this stage of your life. So, what better time to assess your goals and strategies than before the New Year? 

A good place to start is to look at the lifestyle you envision for retirement. If you are still working, you may want to consider your lifestyle now and determine how it may be similar or different in retirement. For example, will you travel more? Have more hobbies? This will help to give you a baseline for expenses in retirement and determine if you should be saving more or less. 

If already retired, it's a good idea to reflect on the year, or past couple of years, and determine if there have been any significant changes that could potentially affect your retirement strategy. For example, what is inflation doing? Where are interest rates at? If we ask these questions currently as we near the end of 2024, we know that interest rates and inflation are still high. Thus, it could be the right time to assess your current investments, such as annuities and life insurance policies, to determine if there are options to potentially upgrade them. At Summerlin Benefits Consulting, we have helped many of our clients take advantage of the current economic climate in order to better reinforce and grow their retirement nest eggs. 

2. Maximize Your 401(k) Contributions

If your employer offers a 401(k) match, aim to contribute enough to capture the full match — essentially free money to grow your retirement savings. Additionally, many 401(k) plans allow for automatic annual contribution increases, often by 1%. If this isn’t available, there should also be the option to manually adjust your contributions to stay proactive. Even a small percentage increase can significantly impact your long-term savings. 

On the flip side of things, many people have 401Ks with previous employers and fail to do anything with those accounts once they leave the job. To put it plainly, they have left their retirement nest eggs in the hands of their former employers. It is a good time to take back control of those accounts and Summerlin Benefits Consulting can help you do that. 

3. Stay Within Updated IRA Contribution Limits for 2024 

For 2024, the IRA contribution limits are: 

• $7,000 for individuals under age 50. 
• $8,000 for those aged 50 or older (including the $1,000 catch-up contribution). 

Remember, these are "use-it-or-lose-it" limits. Contributions not made by the deadline (April 15, 2025, for the 2024 tax year) cannot be rolled over to subsequent years. If you haven’t maxed out your IRA, consider catching up before the deadline. 

4. Contribute to Other Retirement Saving Vehicles 

You may have other retirement saving vehicles that you can also contribute to. For example, many Fixed Index Annuities offer the option to add funds, however you should be aware that there may be a timeframe within which you must do so. It’s important to make note of your deadline so that you don’t miss it. 

If your annuity is a Tax Qualified IRA, it will also follow the same contribution limits listed above in Checklist Item #3. The annuity will have the same “use it or lose it” limits, so be sure to set reminders if you intend to add funds, that way you don’t miss out. 

If you have retirement saving vehicles, but aren’t sure what you have, Summerlin Benefits Consulting can do the leg-work for you so you don’t have to. An account gathering call is often a great first step into diving deeper into your investments to make sure you are confident in what your investments are doing to grow your money for you. In fact, we’ll talk more about that in the next checklist item. 

5. Rebalance Your Investment Portfolio 

Year-end is an excellent time to revisit your portfolio to ensure it aligns with your goals and risk tolerance, which may shift as you experience significant life changes. You should be decreasing risk as you age, because you have less time to make up any significant losses. A general, helpful guideline to determine a reasonable level of risk to keep in your portfolio is called “The Rule of 100”. This rule states that you subtract your age from 100 and the result is an acceptable percentage of your portfolio to keep in a more risky financial vehicle. For example, if you are 60 years old, then it makes sense to keep no more than 40% of your assets in riskier areas such as stocks and mutual funds. Under this rule, 60% of your investments should then be in safer environments such as fixed index annuities or bonds. 

6. Consult With a Financial Professional 

If you have questions about any of the above checklist items, or simply don’t know where to start, a financial professional can help. If you are already established with a good financial advisor, then that person would be a good one to go to. But, if you’ve always managed your own retirement savings, or maybe you have a financial advisor but don’t feel like you’re getting enough support from them, it could be a good time to “shop around” and make an appointment or two to ensure you find the right fit. You should feel comfortable with your advisor and confident that you and your investments are getting the most out of the relationship. 

A good financial professional will help you diversify your portfolio by balancing safety and risk, assess your financial plan during times of transition, such as job or life changes, and will help guide you through the best options for your personal needs while keeping you in the driver’s seat to make the decisions. At Summerlin Benefits Consulting, we do all of this and more, while keeping things simple and easy to understand for our clients. 

Bottom Line 

Whether retirement is decades away or just around the corner, an end-of-year financial review is a smart move. Revisiting your contributions, aligning with updated limits, and seeking expert guidance can set you up for continued success. Don’t hesitate to leverage the expertise of a financial planner to refine your strategy — your future self will thank you. Call Summerlin Benefits Consulting today and we are happy to provide a complete, no obligation financial review to get you started off on the right track in 2025!