When you get close to retirement, you may want to take less risk with your retirement planning investments. There are three important things you need to look out for in your retirement planning investment. The very basic thing is that you need to avoid losses as much as possible and secondly you need to have growth to keep up with the inflation to support your spending needs down the road. Inflation can do a lot over a 30-year period, and retirement can last that long and then finally you need to generate sufficient income. So, here we are going to look at five best retirement planning investment options that are going to help you out with those three things.

Build a total return portfolio
It is best to get the suggestions from your financial advisor to do this. One general way to generate retirement income is to build a portfolio of bond and stock. The portfolio is a range of investments held by a person which is specially designed to get a long-term rate of return on investments. Along the long run, you need to stick with the withdrawal rate rules that lets you take the max percentage of the amount in a year and support your withdrawals for inflation. The idea of total returns is best for the experienced investors who are good at playing with money. People who are eminent at managing their money, making logical, planned decisions or get the assistance from the advisor are good to go with this approach.

Dividend-paying stocks
These can help supplement the income that you receive from social security. Income is very important in retirement if you do not feel comfortable researching individual companies to know what to invest in as far as which stock pays a good dividend you can find dividend income funds to that for you. The dividend is something good to invest in as they provide level-headed income each year if the companies increase their dividend payouts, but during deprecation, your dividend can get below the expected or bring to a halt. At the same time, be cautious about the high dividend stocks that bring your better yields than regular rates it comes along with risks. If a company is paying significantly higher yields, there is no doubt that it is doing go to compensate you for taking additional risk. This would be a great retirement planning investment.

Bonds
When you invest in bonds you are lending money to a company, a government, corporate or a municipality, they pay interest, or they pay back the principal at maturity. These can help with your income planning and retirement; they can also help provide more stability in your portfolio to reduce volatility in that risk. The interest you receive from the bond can be a steady source of retirement income. The short-term, midterm and long-term and floating bonds that provides adjustable interest rates, as well as the high yield bonds which pay larger rates but have a lower quality rating. Bonds can be purchased as a bond exchange-traded fund, as a package in the form of a bond mutual fund or buy individual bonds.

Fixed annuities
Annuities get a bad rap, and it’s unfortunate they actually can work very well when they are used properly in a portfolio. Fixed annuities do not take any market risks because they are fixed. They provide more stability they can help you with the income as well, and they can give you guarantees, even guarantees on the interest rate that will be getting from them. One of the popular uses of fixed annuities is to guarantee an income stream for the rest of your life. Fixed and immediate annuities are the best solution for those who don’t have any other sources of income and for those who are a spend theft and for individuals with long life expectancies. This would be a great retirement planning investment.

Rental real estate
A lot of you may not be on board of that idea of becoming a landlord is just the worst idea in the world to you, but rental real estate can give you a good income source and income source that you can increase in the future by increasing your rents to keep up with inflation in retirement. If you already own a property that is not used can be given for rent or if you have plans to buy rental property you need to calculate all the potential expenses that you may incur over the time of owning the property. You will also need to add in the vacancy rates as no property will be rented 100% of the time. The rental real estate is an investment property business not a done with an idea of getting rich quick proposition. For those you have great business skills and have time to put in real estate business, it would be great retirement planning investment.