ThE WORld ThROUGh ThEIR EYES

Chapter 43

theW oRlD thRoUgh

theIR eYes

By John GaJKowsKi

& nanCy CoUtU

Our clients are usually 55-70 years old. ...Middle America. ...worked for
large organizations or owned a small business and are scared about retire-
ment. When can they retire? How much will it cost? Have they saved
enough? What if there is another 2008 economic crisis after they retire?

Nancy and I are very much like them. We came from large middle class
families where we started working young and saved. We worked our
way through college for both large and small companies before starting
our own. Our parents had 30+ years working for the same companies
with the promise of a worry-free retirement. With good pensions, social
security and little savings they did O.K. However, like most of our cli-
ents, we don’t have big pensions and we now have to worry about the
future of social security. We meet people every day who tell us stories
of people they know who retired and ran out of money within 10 or 15
years. They want to know what they have to do to make sure it won’t
happen to them.

Early in our financial planning careers we decided that we should spe-
cialize in retirement planning, but not retirement planning the way
banks, brokerage firms and insurance companies were doing it. We re-
alized that retirement planning wasn’t chasing the highest returns. We
knew that information about whatever stock or bond or other popular