In the last couple of years, American retirement plans have lost nearly two trillion dollars of their asset values. If you’re depending on your 403 b retirement plan and other retirement plan to sustain you during your retirement years, you should start to pay attention to your retirement plan statements.

Most investors, after they’ve chosen the initial investments for their retirement portfolio, rarely take another look at it. If you want to have the best chance of your retirement portfolio supporting you once you retire, you have to manage it.

computations] are easy if you use best retirement software to plan your portfolio.

When you have calculated the present value of your portfolio, contingent on how long you have until retirement, you may have to reevaluate your retirement choices.

In the best case scenario, your portfolio has over performed your income assumptions and you don’t have to change your retirement plans. If, however, like most people, your portfolio has under-performed your income projections, you have some hard decisions to make.

Typically, the choices you have will fall into one of three options. 1) You can decide to step-up the amount of money that you are currently putting into your account to bring it up to what you’ve projected its value to be at this point. 2) You can downsize your expected retirement lifestyle to match your portfolio’s new projected future value based on it’s value today.

The last and final choice you have, is to delay your retirement for a few years to build up your retirement nest or, alternatively, to plan on working part time when you finally retire, in order to avoid having to drop your standard of living.

Please visit Eric Bayne’s website for more info on 401 k rollover and other retirement options.