Who Is Really Winning At Retirement?

I’d like to share a few important discoveries that we’ve made in our business. This list is actually pretty insightful because it’s one that our clients helped us assemble.

1. Those who invest the most in their planning reap the greatest rewards.
2. People who regret financial decisions can usually point to not having enough information about the decision. Typically, this results from lacking the right questions to ask and/or having the green light to ask them.
3. The most regrettable financial decisions often stem from binary thinking. Binary thinking, in this case, is believing that a certain investment, product, or service is inherently good or bad, right or wrong, instead of seeing it as a specific tool to solve a specific problem.
4. Retirees who are most at peace with their decisions work with someone recommended to them rather than responding to a radio show or steak dinner seminar. Real relationships matter, it turns out.

Ultimately, I think we’re all trying to get to the same island. We would all like to feel good about the planning we’ve done; mathematically, emotionally, and intuitively. We’re all interested in feeling secure financially.

I share all of this because the retirement planning business is no different than any other business. How? Just like every other business, competing messages seek to undermine your sense of security, in an attempt to win your business. If you begin to believe your decision-making is flawed and your life savings is at great risk, then you’d better make a change – fast! … or so the marketing story goes. Most marketers work to instill fear so prospects will be driven to action.

Because there’s so much confusion and misinformation being spread over the airwaves and through popular media, we use a very deliberate education-based planning approach to help those who want to maintain their sanity and security. We’ve doubled down on planning…real, comprehensive financial planning.

Imagine for a moment that you decide to build a home. Because you may have never done this before, you move into the home before construction has been completed. While you occupy the home, it’s being built around you, a little bit here and little bit there. Over the course of years, the home takes shape, but the shape is a bit strange, it’s not cohesive and the home doesn’t flow as it should.

Is this a scenario you want to live through? Of course not! Instead, you would hire an architect to design the home ahead of the work, based on your needs and desires, fleshing out the details and asking a lot of questions before building even begins.

Unfortunately, most people build their retirement plan around them, over time, with the hope that it will turn out okay.

At Elevated Retirement Group, we design a blueprint for each new family before they begin making major financial decisions. We call it our Elevated Planning Process. We’re helping families understand their needs along with the nuances of the plan design in order to avoid regret and ultimately to assure their financial security.

While we can’t control markets, governments, and economies, we can design a blueprint that will account for these events and variables to respond in a way that maintains confidence and security regardless of the storms that rage outside. This makes sense to us and it appears to make sense to the families we serve. While it’s great to be an investor, it pays to also invest in a planning process that helps to ensure the great outcomes you deserve.