Retirement Planning

Retirement planning is a key part of what we do for our clients. A comfortable retirement is the ultimate financial planning goal for many of our clients. Investment management, tax planning and the other work we do with our clients are geared towards helping our clients plan for their retirement.

Our approach to retirement planning is centered upon your vision for your retirement. We start with that vision and integrate our planning around that. As you approach retirement, we take a hard look at your withdrawal strategy as well helping you determine the optimal strategy for claiming your Social Security benefits.

Social Security planning

Even though you can claim your Social Security benefits as early as age 62, for most people this doesn’t make sense as they are leaving money on the table. Everyone’s situation is different, however. We incorporate the optimal Social Security benefit claiming strategy as a key part of their retirement planning.

The best time to claim benefits will depend on a number of factors including how long the client will be working, their other retirement resources and whether they are single or married. In the case of a married couple, we look at a number of factors including the relative ages of each spouse, their expected benefit levels and other factors. It’s important to optimize your benefits and also to ensure that a surviving spouse would have the largest benefit possible in the event of the death of the other spouse.

Widows and widowers, as well as those who are divorced, have special rules surrounding claiming their benefits. We understand these rules and help advise these clients as to their optimal claiming strategy.

We use a Social Security analyzer to help calculate the optimal claiming strategy for our clients. Although we work to help ensure that our clients have a significant retirement nest egg, Social Security is still an important piece of the retirement puzzle for all of our clients.

Healthcare planning

The cost of healthcare in retirement is a major expenditure for most retirees. Medicare is the main vehicle for most retirees to cover their healthcare costs and we help our clients with their Medicare planning.

For those who retire prior to being eligible for Medicare, we help them evaluate their health insurance options to ensure that they get the coverage that they need at an affordable cost to bridge the gap until they are eligible for Medicare.

Early retirement

Some of our clients retire early, both voluntarily and due to a late career job loss. We help clients plan for early retirement in both types of situations.

For those who envision leaving the workforce in their 50s or early 60s, making this work financially takes planning. This includes issues like health care costs, how to tap your nest egg or will you continue to work in some fashion?

In some cases, early retirement is forced on some of clients through corporate layoffs and downsizing. In these situations our planning work with our clients helps them navigate the next steps in their life by helping them plot their financial future.

Withdrawal strategies

A properly planned retirement withdrawal strategy takes your retirement nest egg and optimizes it into a dependable stream of income for your retirement.

Saving and investing to accumulate a nest egg for retirement is important. Your retirement nest egg is the fuel that powers your retirement, so to speak. However, the benefits of your nest egg need to be optimized to ensure that you get the most out of it. That’s where a retirement withdrawal strategy comes into play.

Designing the best retirement withdrawal strategy for your situation is a multifaceted process. We take all sources of our client’s retirement income into account. This includes taxable investments, assets in retirement accounts, Social Security, a pension if the client has one, interest in a business if applicable and any other sources of income they might have.

As clients move through retirement, we factor in the impact of required minimum distributions as they approach the age where they commence. Every client’s situation is different, in some cases the client may not need the money from these distributions. In those cases we look at some strategies to minimize their RMDS prior to the date they commence.

The withdrawal strategy takes into account your age, your tax situation, are you working into retirement and a number of other factors. Your withdrawal strategy is not static, we review each client’s withdrawal strategy annually. We make adjustments for changes in their situation often arise over time.