Together 2025 Speaker Article: Part 10 with Wolf Steinhauer
With clear and practical insights, Wolf Steinhauer led a hands-on financial planning workshop at ELIA Together 2025, guiding attendees through the fundamentals of assessing their current financial situation, setting long-term goals, and using investment strategies to build a stable and sustainable future. His workshop offered a structured approach to achieving financial independence with realistic calculations and long-term thinking. Reflecting on his experience delivering this workshop, Wolf shares with us his key session takeaways:
Strategic Financial Planning: How to Save, Invest, and Finance Your Life and Retirement
With a smile on my face I am thinking back to ELIA together and the marvelous people who attended.
My speech was about creating your personal financial strategy i.e. how to retire as early as you want. Therefore, I will use the next few hundred words to repeat a few key points for the attendees and everybody else who could not join us.
We first assessed where we are financially and listed every asset we have. Easy.
Next we need to establish a goal, where we want to go. A rough estimate could be the average income of the country you are living in adjusted for inflation.
In our example, we had 2.206€ in Spain. If we assume 2% inflation that would be 3.289€ in 20 years and 4.906€ in 40 years.
According to the insurance giant Allianz we are going to need around 80% of our last salary.
Then we subtract our public pension from that and voilà! Here we have the gap we need to close. In some cases that might be only a few hundred euros. For the sake of easy mathematics we will assume a gap of 1000€. If 1000€ per month is missing, that would be 12.000€ per year. Then we add in your local taxes and we get a number of around 16.000€, assuming 25% taxes.
With a moderate return of only 5% per year, we need 320.000€ to retire and have enough money to maintain our standard of living for an indefinite time, because we do not touch our principal. We only need the 5% return that our money will be providing for us.
That still sounds a bit much, so we will enlist the help of our friend, the market. The global economy is growing at around 7-8% per year. That means, with a return of 7% our money will double roughly every 10 years.
This is called the Rule of 72 and here it is:
- 72 : percentage = doubling time
- 72 : 7% = 10.28 years
That means, we do not need all the money. We need half of it and 10 years’ time or just 25% and 20 years. 160.000€ and ten years to your retirement sounds a lot more reasonable. 80.000€ and 20 years to retirement sounds even better.
The earlier you start, the easier it is going to be. So do not procrastinate and get going. Most people already save on a regular basis, what you need to do is put your saving efforts in the right context, so you know where you are and where you are going.
Our few hundred words are already up, if you would like to know more or talk about your individual situation, do not hesitate to get in touch, we are organizing regular webinars.
Do you already have a personal financial strategy in place? What are your thoughts? Don’t hesitate to reach out to Wolf via LinkedIn to continue the conversation!
Share your thoughts on this topic here on LinkedIn, and follow this series to look back at some of our ELIA Together 2025 sessions.
