Your Personalized Retirement Plan
Your Personalized Retirement Plan: Matching Your Money with Your Mindset When shopping for a new car or appliance, most people turn to a buyer’s guide to compare features, evaluate options, and feel more confident about their decision. So why shouldn’t retirement planning work the same way? While there’s no official guidebook for converting your life savings into lasting retirement income, …
Briefcase Study: Is Status-Chasing Affecting Your Retirement?
Have you ever stopped to reflect on how much status influences your decisions? In professional life, it’s easy to see – titles like supervisor, director, or CEO make it clear who sits where in the hierarchy. But status doesn’t just live in the office. It quietly shapes the cars we drive, the neighborhoods we choose, the vacations we take, and …
Back to the Basics: Is Retirement Still All-Inclusive?
Is Retirement Still All-Inclusive? Not Exactly – But It Can Be Well-Planned Who doesn’t love the ease of an all-inclusive vacation? You choose your destination, book your excursions, pack your bags, and when you arrive – voilà! Everything is already planned, paid for, and ready to enjoy. No surprises, no extra decisions. Just follow the plan and relax. Wouldn’t it …
A Budget versus Budgeting
A Budget versus Budgeting: Why the Difference Matters for Retirement Life is full of goals and resolutions that come and go – some stick, most don’t. But money goals? They tend to linger. That’s because the need for money, and the challenges that come with managing it, never really go away. And when retirement starts appearing on the horizon, those …
The Challenge of So Many Retirement Choices
If you were to ask me what is my very favorite thing, I think I’d say it’s choice. I suppose it’s like declaring that freedom is good. The very ability to make choices with our time, money, relationships, careers…these all make life so much richer than the alternative, having few choices. An uncluttered view of a distant horizon? Love it. …
Roth Now, Win Later
Taxes, taxes, taxes. When we celebrate Independence Day each year, it’s easy to focus on the fireworks and forget that much of our dispute was over taxes. After all, wasn’t that part of the deal when we declared to the British that we wanted to see other people? That ‘taxation without representation’ thing, right? Well, in the hundreds of years …
Retirement Planning, in Just One Word
Working in the retirement planning realm for so long has given me the opportunity to talk with hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people about what they hope to experience during retirement. Discussions of money, time, and purpose lead to so many interesting insights about what a life well-lived might look like. A simple question like, “What would you like retirement to …
Client Corner: 50 Years of Marriage (but Still on Trial)
Cindy and I are celebrating fifty years of marriage this May, and while I like to joke that she’s still on trial, the truth is I couldn’t have asked for a better partner in life. My career in retail focused on developing people, which led us to move fourteen times over the years. No matter where we landed, Cindy always …
Retirement Phases
It’s easy to think of retirement as one thing, one phase of life that we all aspire to experience. And why not? After all, retirement is such a stark contrast to the preceding decades-long phase that’s built around paid work. But what if retirement is made up of many different smaller phases, distinct from one another in activity level and …
Planning Retirement Income
There are several questions that hopeful retirees are consistently asking as they seek to build a successful retirement. Some of these questions are: When can I retire? How much do we need? Will I have enough? What if there’s a major healthcare, stock market, or inflationary event that threatens what we’ve saved? While all of these questions are certainly different …
