Retirement Plans

I work full time and contribute towards a retirement plan and I’m earning a pension. I’ve been considering becoming a full time mom, however if I stop working, I’ll lose my pension (not vested yet). I’ll get to keep what I’ve saved in my retirement plans but it’s not where it should be as my pension was my main plan for retirement. I don’t want to be a financial burden to my kids in any way in the future. My parents saved enough so my siblings and I would never be put in a position to have to care for them financially during retirement. Of course we would if they needed it, but they will likely never need it. I want to make sure I do the same for my kids. So I’m curious what other full time parents/stay at home parents plan to do for retirement?

Show your support

We have an investment account. I don’t know if we could afford for me to stop working but if I did I would feel good about it because we’ve got a pretty large amount saved already. We’ve been working on saving for about ten years now. I definitely will be considering taking a year off of we are able to have another child.

I feel dumb asking this because you didn’t mention a spouse but, are you married? My husband puts money into a spousal IRA for me and I have it in our post-nup that if we divorce, he continues to contribute to the IRA and I get my share at retirement age.

I have VERY recently been toying with the idea of going the full-time parent route myself and your question made me curious! I guess there's such a thing as a Spousal IRA, which I had never heard of but might be worth looking into! There are income limits like any IRA, but I will be exploring. Currently our household just makes sure to max out my husband's account, and I have a fair bit of stock and my own 401K from when I worked in corporate; not touching the stock until necessary is part of my plan. I keep meaning to set up a 401k for my business but I just never got around to running the financials on whether it makes sense/keep putting it off.

I’m married. We have a joint investment account and we both have individual investment accounts and IRAs that we’ve been investing aggressively recently. We both max out our 401k each year and we have 529 plans for the kids that we also max out each year. Hubby has stock- I don’t. I do however have real estate that is paid off that we rent out. We decided a long time ago that if we divorced, we would split all marital assets equally but that each person’s individual retirement accounts are their own. Since we both always worked high paying job, this wasn’t an issue. However, if I stopped working- hubby could maintain the family expenses and the kids’ college accounts but everything else would take a hit. I was just worried about not being able to contribute towards retirement and what that could mean for me when I’m ready to retire (with or without hubby). I’d never heard of a spousal IRA, thank you, l’ll definitely look into it! Sounds like it might help with some of my worries.

‌

‌
‌

‌

‌
‌

‌

‌
‌

‌

‌
‌

‌

‌
‌

‌

‌
‌