Sound Financial Advice While Baking Chocolate Chip Peanut Butter Cookies #GenworthHoliday

My grandma is someone I have always admired. I go to her for all kinds of advice from cooking to financial planning. I go over to her house often, since she lives down the street, to soak up all the wisdom I can. This most recent trip, we made her famous chocolate chip peanut butter cookies recipe. Every year at the holidays we always pick a few family favorites to make for when everyone gathers together to celebrate Christmas. We often talk about all sorts of things ranging from her teaching me photography and me teaching computers to deep discussions about life planning.

I am my grandma’s little angel, so she always wants to make sure I will be okay. With the recent crash in the stock market, my husband lost all of his retirement and then he was laid off when the company closed the Fort Myers branch. I started building Makobi Scribe, so we were okay and getting by, but I did not even have an inkling of a business plan much less one for retirement. After a few years of blogging, I am now in a position to start saving money and look towards a retirement savings plan. Naturally I asked my grandma what she did and how she protected her retirement savings plan.

She told me of several ways to protect your retirement savings plan and even how she has guaranteed income for life. These days the word retirement means something completely different than what it did back in her day. A lot about our economical situation has changed. We retire at a different age and with a very different lifestyle planned. My mom, who is now 60 is going to have to downgrade her home and work part-time to be able to retire whereas ten years ago she was planning on retiring right where she was at age 55. By the time I want to retire, I am not even sure Social Security  will be there. Grandma told me I could create my own plan to fund the retirement I want. She told me to look into annuities.

An annuity is where you give money to an insurance company and in return they give you a guaranteed stream of income for a specific period of time or even for life. In addition, deferred annuities can guarantee you a rate of interest. Further, one of the biggest advantages of deferred annuities offer is that they allow you to accumulate an amount of money while deferring paid taxes.

My choices right now are to work longer, make do with less, or supplement my retirement savings portfolio with an annuity. Since women live longer than men, this is an especially important topic for me. My Grandpa died ten years ago, and my Grandma is doing quite well. I am going to research further at Genworth Financial and you can too. Click through the image above and you can learn how to protect your retirement savings. Since this whole conversation happened over Chocolate Peanut Butter Cookies, it is only fair that I share the recipe right?

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