TRANSCRIPT:
Hi, I’m Alex Chandler, Certified Financial Planner at Base Wealth Management. If you’re part of the Florida retirement system, especially if you’re a teacher or public employee, you’ve probably asked yourself at some point, is the FRS pension or the investment plan enough for retirement, or should I be saving more on top of it? It is a great question, and the short answer is, it depends on what kind of retirement you want. The FRS is a valuable benefit, whether you’re in the pension plan or the investment plan, but it’s usually designed to replace only part of your income, not all of it. That gap between what the FRS provides and what you’ll actually need in retirement is what I call the personal responsibility zone. That’s where your own savings comes into play. I worked with someone recently, let’s just call her Jen, a high school English teacher. She was about 15 years into her career, and had always assumed that the FRS pension would take care of her retirement. But once we sat down and actually looked at the numbers, we realized that will likely only cover about 50 to 60% of her current income.
That’s not bad, but it also meant she’d either need to live on less or start saving more if she wanted the kind of freedom she pictured for retirement. For Jen, it wasn’t about lavish spending. It was about keeping her routines, being able to take her grandkids on little trips, go out to lunch with friends, and not stress over every dollar. Once she saw the gap clearly, she decided to start putting a few hundred dollars a month into her 403B. Nothing extreme, just enough to start building the rest of her plan. So, how much should you be saving? There’s no magic number, but here’s a simple way to get perspective. Think about your current lifestyle, and then ask yourself, if I stopped working tomorrow, how much of this lifestyle would I wanna keep? If FRS doesn’t fully cover that, your own savings will need to fill the gap. Keep in mind, you don’t need to have all the answers today, but getting clear on the direction you’re heading is very powerful, because once you see the numbers, you can actually do something about it.
That means adjusting your savings, changing your timeline, or simply just being more intentional. If you’re not sure where you stand or how much is enough, let’s talk. We can run the numbers, look at your options, and help you feel more confident about the road ahead. Thank you so much for watching. And remember, the FRS can give you a strong foundation, but what you build on top of it determines the kind of retirement you’ll actually get to live.
