Our Process

Guiding You Through Your Financial Lifecycle

During the planning process, we pride ourselves on educating our clients with the information and tools necessary for success. We interpret the professional jargon, filter the pertinent, and translate simple and easy-to-understand concepts that clients can grasp, appreciate, and implement to help create their plan to fulfill added peace of mind for their golden years.

Throughout the planning process, our focus is centered around the four phases of one’s financial lifecycle:

  • Accumulation
  • Preservation
  • Distribution
  • Legacy

As one crosses the threshold of accumulation (working years) to distribution (retirement), your income not only becomes needed but establishes the base of your lifestyle, which needs to be accounted for without fluctuation or variables outside of your control. Interest rates, market fluctuation, geo-political risk, etc. are a few items that should not affect the frequency and value of the paycheck deposited into your checking account on a monthly basis.

Secure Income

In retirement planning, a priority must be placed on secure income. In our experience, the happiest retirees are typically the ones with reliable and systematic monthly income. We help by identifying which retirement income should be placed in income-producing assets, and in what products or strategies to place these assets.

Once we have worked to build a retirement income floor, we build on that with your growth portfolio. Remember that you still need to place emphasis on preservation, which may depend on your personality or on the amount of reliable income you have coming in each month. One thing is true: You’re not going to start your career over and re-earn all of this money, so let’s invest with downside protection. Our portfolios feature a trailing stop loss that follows your investments up, helping you hold onto the gains you’ve made during a bull market. Fewer losses can help protect you from years of trying to recover your retirement, which can potentially provide added peace of mind and have tangible benefits such as more money to upgrade your car or take a European river cruise.

Accounting for Taxes

Within the next 10 years, the Congressional Budget Office has projected the national debt to rise to approximately 98% of the U.S. GDP.1 The U.S. government will need a way to pay for programs that the country has become entitled to and depends upon. Lower spending, hyperinflation, and raising taxes are all tactics the government could use to make up the deficit. Out of the three listed, which seems the most easy and logical? If you guessed raising taxes, then you think like we do.

In order to help make certain that you keep most of your hard-earned dollars, tax planning needs to be implemented years in advance. Tax planning is NOT done between February and April 15 while handing over your shoe box of receipts to a tax preparer. Tax planning techniques are established and utilized throughout the year to take full advantage of the Internal Revenue Code, which is ever-changing.

Consider Roth Conversions

Are you wondering if Roth conversions are right for you? Have you thought about selling an investment property, but capital gains taxes are keeping you from it? Maybe you have an ongoing or future RMD that’s creating tax bills that you would like to get rid of?

We address everything mentioned above and more in our comprehensive retirement income tax analysis. In fact, we don’t look at taxes as a separate topic. We analyze every source of your retirement income simultaneously to determine the most tax-efficient strategy and show you exactly what you can expect to pay in retirement. Taxes are inevitable, but you shouldn’t have to pay more than you have to!

1. https://www.marketwatch.com/story/us-national-debt-projected-to-rise-to-314-trillion-by-2030-cbo-2020-01-28

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