UlTImATE SUccESS GUIdEinvestments of the day was not the most important issue for people. The
most important issues of retirement planning are protecting and freeing
up their most valuable asset, time, and bringing a high degree of cer-
tainty to their financial lives in a very uncertain world.
Unlike others in our field, we realized retirement planning was about de-
veloping a lifetime strategy with income that you could not outlive. For
many people, their greatest fears are uncertainty and the gnawing feel-
ing that one day they will run out of money. We wanted to address those
fears and eliminate them with reasonable certainty. We believe this can
only be done by spending a great amount of time with our clients to help
them identify exactly where they are right now and what their ultimate
goals are. Once we have established this, our responsibility is to sit in
their chairs, look at the world through their eyes and bring our special-
ized financial expertise to them. We know that there is no shortage of
investment ideas. Like our clients, we are constantly bombarded with
ads on the latest and greatest investments. They come and go. We firmly
believe that most investments have a purpose in various portfolios, but
we focus on the ones that are appropriate to our clients’ situation.
John and I became Certified Financial Planners™ and focused on
becoming specialists in retirement and estate planning because we like
helping people prepare for what should be the happiest years of their
lives. Most people approaching retirement age are afraid to retire for
fear they will outlive their money. They might not have the pensions that
their parents and grandparents had. They will live years longer, which
means their money has to keep up with inflation and last much longer.
Often people retire and run out of money within 10-15 years. They don’t
know how to figure out how much “is enough.” They see the price of
goods going up while the return on their retirement savings has been
disappointing. They know that the investments within their retirement
savings plan at work offer no guarantees, but they don’t know where to
find safer alternatives.
We begin the process by explaining to them that they should not be focus-
ing on the job they are retiring “from,” but rather to think about and plan
for what they are retiring “to” because they might spend 1/3 of their life
in retirement. Then we have them document what their “required” ex-
penses are right now. We inflate those numbers annually and project them
to ages 90-95. Once we have those numbers established, we then add their