Retirement Portfolio Planning for Farmers

To assist farmers in retirement planning, this project aims to 1) develop a portfolio optimization model in Excel that considers basic farm returns and standard investment alternatives (e.g., index mutual funds) and 2) provide about 75 county extension agents and 150 farmers in Kentucky and Tennessee with training of this tool in a series of short workshops. Upon completion, we expect participants to be able to 1) understand basic retirement planning principles such as diversification, 2) identify where they can access the many basic planning tools currently available and 3) use the currently unavailable farmer oriented portfolio analyzer developed herein. We anticipate about 100 farmers will learn the methods involved directly and, of these, about 70 will make plans to adopt the techniques. In turn, county agents will help other farmers beyond this for an indirect benefit of the workshops but a direct benefit of the retirement planning portfolio tool.