Retirement Planning

Stage 1: Accumulation of Wealth

Early Accumulation Years

During your career, you strive to balance your resources between immediate needs and the long-term savings required to obtain financial independence.

Pre-Retirement Years

Pre-retirement planning is critical to a successful long-term financial plan. The years prior to retirement tend to be the maximum earning years. Planning can help determine how much additional savings may be needed to replace your take-home pay plus cover the costs of health insurance, taxes, and often a margin to cover special expenses, including hobbies like travel. Projecting income taxes in the pre-retirement years and early retirement years can help determine the right types of accounts to direct the additional savings to.

Stage 2: Distribution of Wealth During Retirement

In this stage of wealth management, it is critical to project the trajectory of your retirement capital. We utilize financial planning software to project your sources of retirement income and expenses to see how long your capital may last. We often summarize projections under three categories:

• X1 Retirement: An X1 retirement projection shows a client may deplete their saved capital before their life expectancy. From our experience, managing these retirement scenarios are the most stressful, as there is little margin. We often encourage clients in this situation to consider working longer, spending less, or a combination of these choices to allow their capital projection to look stronger.
• X2 Retirement: Here, client’s look to preserve their capital throughout their life expectancy. Ideally, we encourage clients to strive toward at least an X2 retirement. From our experience, this provides margin for unanticipated goals and a buffer for unexpected risks they might face in the future. 
• X3 Retirement:  X3 projections illustrate a client’s capital growing throughout retirement. Clients with these projections will want to carefully consider their wealth transfer strategy and estate plan.

Golden Years

One of the most joyful stages of our lives should be retirement, but this life transition holds many changes that can be stressful if not adequately prepared for.

Platinum Years

Over time, we assist families through many transitions. Incapacity challenges even the most prepared, and having a team who knows you and can assist you and your family is a great benefit. For those with financial margin, helping family and the community you serve may offer rich rewards.

Stage 3: Transfer of Wealth at Death

Knowing you may leave a legacy to your family or the charities you support is a great joy. The loss of our loved ones is inevitable and never easy. We have expertise coming alongside surviving family members with the many questions that arise.

Note: actual retirement projections fall amongst the range of these X1, X2, or X3 categories.  A clients’ choices: how much to spend, when to retire, etc., may result in different projected retirements. It’s our objective throughout all stages, to monitor and update our projections to help clients understand the impacts of their financial choices.