5 Pre-Retirement Mistakes Investors Make

By Brent Meyer — SafeMoney.com Founder & Editor Reviewed by Licensed Financial Professionals  |  SafeMoney.com — Trusted Since 2011  |  Updated Regularly Quick Answer: Avoid common pre-retirement mistakes to secure your future. Learn how safe money alternatives can help. Start planning today with SafeMoney.com. It sure can feel good to be in the homestretch toward retirement. But retired life is a different ballgame than the years we spent working and accumulating wealth. People are living longer, and this increases the risk of outliving our money – not to mention other challenges that can put our goals at jeopardy.    While there’s no such thing as a fail-safe strategy, it definitely helps to have a retirement financial plan for ever-evolving economic conditions. Knowing what to do to plan is certainly part of that. But it’s just as important to understand what not to do . Otherwise inferior decisions could negatively affect your retirement lifestyle for many years to come. Here are five potential missteps you should strive to avoid as you look ahead to retirement. 5 Common Pre-Retirement Mistakes 1. Drawing on retirement savings early.   It can tempting to make withdrawals from your retirement accounts before you retire. This is especially true when money is tight in other areas. But taking money from your IRA or 401(k) may prove costly in a number of ways. If you are younger than age 59.5, not only might you have to pay income taxes on any retirement account withdrawals — you may be looking at an additional 10% penalty as well. Some 401(k) plans come with hardship provisions for withdrawals, but not all employers permit them.  Even if you are past 59.5, taking money now will diminish the funds you can use for income later on. Just like for other Americans, it’s likely that your retirement accounts will serve as a major faucet of your future income streams. This trade-off involves more than just losing current savings, too. Every withdrawal takes investment dollars out of your retirement accounts that could otherwise grow with rising markets. So, you may want to think about leaving aside early withdrawals as much as possible. This is important especially as increasing lifespans elevate the risk of outliving retirement money . 2. Not discussing retirement goals and expectations with your partner.  Ask 100 financial professionals about the most common retirement mistakes they see with c