Introduction

Whether you actually want to retire from work right now or just want to find out what your current options might be regarding when you can retire, you’ll no doubt be looking for help on the internet to guide you. The current economic situation is inevitably having an effect on everyone’s pension plans, whether they’re held in a company pension scheme, a private pension scheme or a combination of the two. Those people who will be reliant on the interest from capital savings may well feel particularly vulnerable at present regarding whether or not they’re on track for retirement. Why? Well, every time a government lowers the interest rate to help borrowers, those people who have been careful with their money and saved regularly will see the interest gained from their savings fall.

Calculating if you’re on track for retirement

Finding and reading all sorts of advice about retirement pension plans and what age you could/should retire at is all well and good; but sometimes all those facts and figures you read about can end up making you more confused as to whether or not you are on track for your planned retirement. Sometimes all people want is some help actually calculating the value of their own likely retirement pension, rather than reading about the retirement possibilities of someone in Ohio compared to someone living in Beverley Hills, or wherever. What you need is something to run a RetirAbility check for you.

Calculating your retirability

The terms RetirAbility, and the R-Score associated with it, are actually Service Marks for a leading nationwide insurance company - nationwide.com - that you may well have seen advertised in your locality.  Based on the National Retirement Risk Index, as developed by Boston College, calculating your R-Score will give you excellent guidance as to how well you are financially prepared for retirement, or what your RetirAbility is. There’s a detailed and quick access route to getting your R-Score, with the latter quick one being intended for people who just want a quick shot of how well their retirement pension plans are going. If you want to know precisely whether or not you’re pension plans will allow you to retire in the near future, then you should use the full, more detailed, R-Score mechanism.

The process of calculating your R-Score

After selecting to calculate your R-Score for RetirAbility you are taken to a video presentation that will walk you through the process and explain things as you go, all in all it takes about 8 minutes to complete. The questions you’re asked are very straightforward and will probably not even require you to look at any of your pension plan paperwork. After some very basic questions about your household income; you’ll be led on to questions about any company pension plans you’re involved in, what your debts and assets are, if you have any social security pension entitlements and your housing situation. Finally you ask the R-Score calculator to show your personal R-Score, if you score above 100 then your RetirAbility is well on track, if you score below 100 you really need to reconsider your current retirement pension plans. Fortunately the RetirAbility calculator doesn’t just leave you with a raw score. It then proceeds to offer ideas as to how you can raise your R-Score to at least 100 or just simply how to improve it. Four options are presented to you. First there’s an analysis of your personal score, then you can view some scenarios that would help you to improve your R-Score, the next section of your RetirAbility check offers links to other relevant web pages and websites that might of interest to you and, finally, it offers you the option to contact an investment professional to see if they can help you prepare adequately for your retirement. One thing many users of the R-Score calculator like is that at no point during the calculating does it ask you to register any information before proceeding. So you can rest assured that you won’t be pestered with unwanted mail or emails, just because you’ve calculated your R-Score.