What Is Retirement Planning?

It’s never too early to create a financial plan for your retirement. With advance planning, you increase your ability to financially prepare for your retirement years. That advance planning isn’t limited to your savings; you have a wealth of strategies that can help you amass a sizable retirement nest egg during your working years. The act of pulling together all these focus areas is retirement planning.

Working with our Kansas City, MO-based retirement planning firm, you would receive comprehensive retirement services, including:

• Customized investment recommendations

• Tax analysis and planning

• College funding for children and grandchildren

• Health care and insurance planning

• Employee benefits review to optimize your retirement plan

• Advice on stock options and restricted stock

• Estate and beneficiary review

• Charitable giving strategies

• Additional services for business owners including exit strategies and calculations of business value

You may have read certain rules of thumb about hitting a certain number in your retirement savings. The problem with a rule of thumb is that everyone’s situation is unique. Your financial needs are different from, say, your colleague’s. So you may need less savings while they may need more.

The best retirement planning is not a “one size fits all” approach. It is a sophisticated blueprint that starts with your goals and dreams for retirement and incorporates all your financial areas, including income sources and expenses, retirement accounts, taxes, Social Security, Medicare, long-term care needs, and estate goals. When you retire, you should know exactly when and by how much you’ll start withdrawing from your retirement investments. And you shouldn’t have to worry that you’ll deplete your savings.

Whatever your retirement objectives may be, a comprehensive blueprint can go a long way toward helping achieve them. Ultimately, we think your retirement should be about what the word prosperity means to you and the freedom to live it. Our objective is to make your retirement prosperity vision a reality.

The Retirement Planning Process

You’ve worked hard for your success, and you shouldn’t have to spend your retirement wondering whether you were successful enough. Working with a financial advisor who wants to see you prosper in retirement and advise you accordingly can go a long way toward relieving any anxiety that you need to do more to retire well.

By partnering with an advisor while you’re still working, you can assess how on track you are for the retirement lifestyle you want. If you need to take action, you can get the financial planner’s advice while you still have time to maneuver in your working years.

Every financial advisor offering comprehensive retirement planning has a process for working with clients. Ours is a five-step process that we call the Prosperity Planning Blueprint™. We designed it to thoroughly understand clients’ goals and concerns, uncover financial obstacles and opportunities, and build personalized retirement blueprints.

Here’s how the Prosperity Planning Blueprint™ works:

1. It’s All About You

Your hopes and dreams. Your worries. What keeps you up at night. We collect your facts and figures, including important details that are often overlooked. We go above and beyond, taking time to understand your personal financial story and values.

2. BRINGING YOUR NUMBERS TO LIFE

Together we look at scenarios to envision your future. Our process is highly interactive and visual. What if you retire sooner? Or buy a second home? What happens if markets take a sudden decline? By looking at the possibilities, you can focus on the things you can control—like how much to save or spend, and how to invest wisely. You can have confidence that your financial plan is sustainable, even in a world of uncertainty.

3. WE PUT IT IN WRITING

Talk is cheap, but documentation is indispensable. Your Prosperity Planning Blueprint™ summarizes your facts and figures along with the recommendations created just for you. This helps ensure your finances are organized, coordinated, and maximized to meet your most important goals. Your Blueprint is a living document that is updated regularly, so it also serves as an essential reference for you or your loved ones in case of an emergency.

4. MAKING IT HAPPEN

We guide you every step of the way in implementing your plan. This includes fine-tuning your investment strategy, updating beneficiaries, and much more. We also proactively collaborate with other professionals to update wills and trusts, refinance mortgages, plug insurance gaps, and implement tax-saving strategies.

5. PROACTIVE UPDATES

An effective plan needs to keep up with a changing economy and life events. We monitor your investments, track your progress, meet with you regularly, and keep your Blueprint up to date. You also have unlimited access to a CFP® professional for any financial question that arises.

What Areas Does Retirement Planning Address?

Your retirement plan should cover everything in your financial life, from your retirement account distributions to your legacy wishes. Some of the areas in which we commonly make recommendations include:

• Customized investment recommendations: Your investment strategy and portfolio allocations should adjust as you near retirement. You will likely need and want less market risk in case of a downturn; however, you still need to maintain some amount of risk or inflation will erode your savings. We help you decide what is right for you and manage your portfolio accordingly.

• Tax analysis and planning: With a Certified Public Accountant (CPA) on our team, we are a tax-centered financial planning firm. You receive ongoing tax planning and tax-efficient advice on all areas of your wealth.

• College funding for children and grandchildren: If you desire to help out your children and grandchildren with higher-education costs, we help you select the appropriate savings vehicle. You receive recommendations on how much to contribute to the account without hurting your ability to enjoy retirement.

• Health care and insurance planning: We work through your Medicare options with you and help you decide if you need supplemental coverage. Because both health care and long-term care are expensive, we help you determine how you’d pay for these costs.

• Employee benefits review: We help you get a grasp on your options to make the most of your employee benefits for retirement.

• Advice on stock options and restricted stock: Equity compensation is complicated—we help break it down so that selling decisions become easier. Your retirement plan will incorporate your equity compensation strategies.

• Estate and beneficiary review: We review your estate plan for potential gaps (or help you create a plan if you haven’t started). Our ongoing updates include your estate strategies, including a look at your beneficiaries, to make sure all the details still align with your wishes.

• Charitable giving strategies: If you’re philanthropically minded, we help you create a tax-beneficial charitable strategy that meets your wishes while you are alive and after you pass.

• Additional services for business owners: We help business owners exit their business and financially prepare for their next life stage. We help set in place the broad array of financial, tax, and investment strategies to achieve this objective.

Get Started

What does your Prosperity Planning Blueprint™ look like? Schedule a 30-minute discovery call to discuss your situation and how we may be able to help.