Discover the tips and strategies that will help you achieve your retirement goals.

I'm your host, James Canole, and this is the podcast dedicated to helping you retire well.

It all starts right here on Ready for Retirement. for retirement.

Hi, everyone, and welcome to another episode of Ready for Retirement.

I'm your host, James Cannell.

Today's question for the podcast is whether it's better to invest or to pay off debt as you're headed into retirement.

Now, the traditional

thinking is if you can invest and grow your money by 7, 8, 9, 10% per year, or you could pay down

debt, which maybe you're paying 3, 4, 5, 6% on, well, why not use any extra money you have to

invest so that it can grow at 8% instead of using it to pay down debt that you're only

paying 4% interest on. So that's the conventional traditional thinking. This is true and you can't

really argue with the numbers, but there's some other aspects to this that we also want to make

sure that we're considering. So especially as you're preparing for retirement and trying to understand

that as you're in maybe the peak income earning years, what is the best thing to do with that, whether it's the payoff debt to invest or

maybe a combination of the both. So in this podcast, we're going to go through this. We're

going to go through a four-part framework that you should think about as you analyze this question

for your specific situation. But from the get go, I'm just going to get my personal bias out of the way. And my personal bias is that I don't like debt. Now, that's not to say there aren't good

purposes or good reasons for debt. There absolutely are. There are plenty of cases where

using debt makes sense. But my personal bias, just to get it out of the way, is I don't like

debt. Not saying that should be your personal bias, not saying that you need to do things exactly as I would do things personally. Again, this should be unique to you.

But as we're going through this, I just want to throw that out there so that you can understand

where I'm coming from as we start to analyze specific situations because you may not be coming

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