A Partner & Advisor on your biggest goal:
Your Retirement
You only get one chance at retirement; make sure you are on track to have the retirement you always wanted. We guide clients between the two great sins in retirement planning:
(1) running out of money before you run out of life and
(2) leaving behind a big pile of money instead of memories.
Your Assets Held at TD Ameritrade
Retirement Planning Beyond Investments
Your advisor shouldn’t be solely focused on picking and managing your investments. We proactively guide clients in every aspect of their retirement to maximize their retirement lifestyle while managing the risk of running out of money.
BEFORE RETIREMENT:
Defining your ideal retirement and its cost
Minimizing taxes across multiple decades
Contributing your needed amount to retirement accounts
Optimizing your 401(k) & establishing personal retirement accounts
Constructing & managing your portfolio to your required return
AT RETIREMENT:
Giving peace of mind to Live your legacy rather than just leave one
Maximizing Social Security, Medicare, & Pension benefits
Determining retirement spending to maximize enjoyment without running out of money
Adjusting investments through differing stages of retirement
Managing taxes throughout retirement
What’s in a Retirement Plan?
Understanding Your Retirement — We believe retirement is about maximizing your retirement lifestyle, not maximizing your portfolio balance when you die. We begin by understanding and exploring your ideal retirement lifestyle and calculating what it will take to get there.
Exploring Your Ideal Retirement
We’ll guide you in exploring your unique desires for retirement and project a required annual budget to achieve the lifestyle you want.
Expense-Specific Inflation Projections
Inflation isn’t a convenient universal 3%. So we project inflation separately on your five major retirement expense categories: Housing, Healthcare, Food, Transportation, and Fun.
Retirement Navigator
We’ll chart your current course to retirement using your current retirement account balances, annual contributions, and portfolio allocations; and provide a customized analysis of your retirement readiness.
Monthly Contribution Recommendation
You need to save for retirement, but not to the detriment of today. We help clients to save what’s necessary to have a secure and fun retirement while not saving more than they need to.
Investing For Retirement — We utilize ultra-low-cost funds to invest in a mix of asset classes which react differently to economic and government conditions. We believe no one can predict the future, so we construct portfolios to optimize for return & risk regardless future market conditions. And we adjust your portfolio based on what has happened, not what we think might happen.
Decisions based on Sophisticated Statistical Analysis
To get you to your retirement goals, we use academically-proven statistical analysis to advise you on your portfolio, monitor your probability of success, and adjust your plan. Monte Carlo Simulation projects thousands of potential futures for your portfolio to determine the probability and confidence bands of your plan’s success, and also measures sensitivity to changes in expected inflation, taxes, health costs, and other key factors.
Tax-Efficient Asset Location
Traditional tax-deferred accounts, Roth accounts, and standard taxable accounts each have unique tax profiles with advantages and disadvantages. And each will have varying tax implications for different types of investments. We strategically weight your portfolio’s investments in each account type to take advantage of these attributes and minimize your lifetime taxes.
Multi-Decade Tax Planning
Taxes play an enormous role in optimizing your retirement — and not in a good way. Minimizing taxes based on the current tax laws is an integral part of maximizing the money available to your through retirement. Decisions today that result in a small increase in current taxes can save significantly more on taxes through your lifetime.
401(k) Optimization & Portfolio Advising
We advise on your entire portfolio, even the assets we don’t manage, to ensure all of your investments are working together to get you to your retirement goals. In fact, you’ll receive the same advising whether we manage your assets or not.
Establishing Individual Retirement Account
If it makes sense to establish your own IRA accounts, we’ll set them up for you, advise on the investments, and integrate your traditional and Roth IRAs into your comprehensive portfolio.
Investment Management
For clients who don’t want to deal with the busy-work of monitoring, managing, and adjusting their portfolio to keep it on strategy, we offer an optional Investment Management service to free you up to do the things you want to do.
Regular Analysis & Recommendations to optimize your portfolio Including:
Roth Conversions - Lowering your lifetime tax liability by filling up lower tax brackets today and avoiding taxes later.
Re-balancing Bands - Bringing your portfolio back to your strategy when the market throws it out of whack.
Allocation Adjustments - Adjusting the Risk/Return Profile of your portfolio to match changes in your lifestyle, inflation, tax law, your goals, and other key factors.
Claiming Social Security, Medicare, & Pensions — We help you maximize your lifetime benefits from Social Security, Medicare, and Pensions.
Social Security optimal Claiming Strategy
With over 700 different claiming strategies, utilizing the wrong Social Security strategy can easily be a six-figure decision. We determine your optimal claiming strategy to maximize Social Security over your multi-decade retirement and incorporate that strategy into the rest of your financial plan.
Medicare Claiming Strategy
We guide you in understanding and selecting Medicare plans - and changing Medicare plans as your needs change. The ‘right’ Medicare option will depend on your health, your desire for travel, and your preference for predictability vs. potential lower-costs in healthcare expenses.
Claiming Pensions
If you have a pension, at retirement you must make a series of unchangeable choices in how you receive your pension benefit. We guide you in maximizing your benefits based on your unique circumstances. And rarely do we give the typical ‘advice’ to cash out the pension and let us manage the money. If you get this advice from another adviser, ask a lot of follow-up questions.
Spending in Retirement — You should live your legacy, not leave one. Our goal is to give you the confidence and peace-of-mind to spend on enjoying your retirement while you are healthy, knowing there is a plan to provide for your ‘older’ self.
Withdrawal Planning
We plan out your withdrawal strategy based on your unique goals, lifestyle desires, and circumstances. This includes planning front-loading some spending during the first third of retirement when you are healthy and can enjoy more things; lowering spending during the second third of retirement when you have slowed down; and increasing spending slightly during the final stage of retirement when healthcare costs will increase.
Dynamic Withdrawal Strategy
We work to provide you with the maximum responsible annual withdrawals from your portfolio; using ongoing statistical analysis and monitoring inflation, taxes, and other key factors that can put your financial security at risk.
Tax-Efficient Withdrawal Ordering
Our planning withdraws funds from your tax-deferred, Roth, and taxable accounts in an order that minimizes taxation. Your optimal strategy will depend on your lifetime tax brackets and your goals for your money during retirement and after you’re gone.
Living Your Legacy
You should leave your family with a pile of memories rather than money. We help you define the legacy you want to leave and spend your money living that legacy in retirement.
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