In the past few years, the value of U.S. retirement plans have lost almost 2 trillion dollars. So, if you are betting on your 403 b retirement plan and/or alternative retirement plan to support you throughout your retirement years, you should start to devote some serious attention to your monthly or semi-annual retirement plan statements.

Too many people, once they decide on their initial investments, rarely look at their portfolio again. To have the best chance of actually having a retirement portfolio that will support you once you retire, you have to manage it.

The first task that you have to tackle as you start to manage your portfolio, is to assess its current value. In quite a few of the cases you’ll discover that the investments that you originally opened your accounts with are no longer the ideal assets that they seemed when you first chose them. The calculations are easy if you use financial planner software to plan your portfolio.

When you have calculated the present value of your portfolio, depending on how long you have until retirement, you may have to re-assess your retirement options.

If you’re fortunate, your portfolio will have out-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 amassing into your account in order to bring it up to the amount that you’ve projected its value to be at this point. 2) You can lower your expectations of the retirement lifestyle that you had imagined to match your portfolio’s new projected future value based on it’s value today.

And the last option, and one that many near retirement age are looking at is either put off their retirement for a few years to build up their retirement nest or to plan on working part time once they do retire, to avoid lessening their standard of living.

Please visit Eric Bayne’s website for more information regarding senior retirement communities and other retirement options.