3 Investments To Buy Now So You Don’t Have To Rely on Social Security
Written by
Karen Doyle
Edited by
Levi Leidy
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If more of your working life is behind you than ahead of you, you may rightly be concerned about whether Social Security will still be available to you when you retire. If you’re considering retiring in the next 10 years or so, there are steps you can take now to set yourself up for a comfortable retirement, regardless of what happens with Social Security.
The first thing to keep in mind is that Social Security provides a stream of income in retirement. As the program stands today, once you begin collecting benefits, you will receive a payment every month until you die. The amount you receive will increase a little bit every year, based on the cost of living. So if you don’t want to have to rely on Social Security to fund your retirement, you’ll need to choose investments that can mimic this stream of income.
Here are three investments to buy now so you don’t have to rely on Social Security.
Dividend Stocks
When you buy a stock, you’re buying a piece of the company. If the company becomes more valuable, which is the idea of having a company, the price of the stock will go up. When you sell your stock, you’ll hopefully sell it for more than you paid for it, and therefore you’ll make money.
But some stocks pay dividends to their shareholders on a regular basis. Dividends are payments made by the company as a way of distributing wealth to shareholders. Dividends may be paid in cash or in additional shares of stock. Cash dividends can be reinvested by using them to purchase additional shares of stock.
By buying dividend stocks and reinvesting the dividends before you retire, you can build up a nice portfolio of dividend stocks. When it comes time to retire, you can take the dividends in cash to provide an income stream without depleting your portfolio.
Dividend stocks also increase in value like all stocks, giving investors two ways to profit from owning dividend stocks.
Bonds
Bonds can also produce income, making them a good alternative to Social Security. When you purchase a bond, you are loaning money to the company, or to a government entity in some cases. The issuer of the bond pays you interest, usually every six months, and at the end of the term of the bond, you get back the amount you paid for the bond. So, the interest is your investment return on the bond.
That interest can create an income stream for you in retirement. When each bond matures, you can use the proceeds to purchase another bond. Since bond yields fluctuate based on interest rates, you may want to create a bond ladder by purchasing several bonds of varying maturities so that you have one maturing every year or so. When each matures, you can purchase a longer-term bond to continue the cycle.
Annuities
An annuity is another way to produce a stream of income in retirement. An annuity is not an investment per se; rather, it is a contract between you and an insurance company. You pay the insurance company money, either in a lump sum or over time. At some point in time, which can be right away (in the case of an immediate annuity) or in the future (in the case of a deferred annuity), the insurance company will pay you back in a series of periodic payments.
The payments you will receive from an annuity can last for your entire life, regardless of how long you live. When you start getting payments, or annuitize the contract, the company will determine the amount of your payments based on the amount of money you put into the annuity and your age. The monthly payments represent the annuity company’s only obligation to you — there is no longer a “lump sum” in your contract.
Here’s an example. Suppose you purchase a deferred annuity for $100,000. Ten years later, you decide to retire. Your annuity is now worth $200,000. The annuity company will pay you $10,000 a year for the rest of your life. If you live for 35 years, you’ll collect $350,000 from the annuity, even though the value when you annuitized was only $200,000. But the opposite is also true. If you only live another two years after annuitizing, you only collect $20,000.
There are some annuities that offer a guaranteed number of payments, e.g., 10 or 20 years, known as a “period certain.” If you annuitize your contract with a 10-year period certain option, the annuity will pay out for your lifetime or 10 years, whichever is longer. If you die two years after annuitizing, your beneficiaries will get paid for the remaining eight years.
If you are still several years away from retirement and have concerns about whether Social Security will be around when it comes time to collect, these options can help you create an income stream that you’ll have no matter what happens.
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