Are you headed toward a smooth retirement or a brutal surprise?
Ok, I’ll spare you the cliché quotes about planning, Google brought up 202,000,000 inspirational quips.
You probably get the point of this article already, planning helps improve your chances of retirement success right? So, hold on a second, here is something that might help you get to where you want to go.
It’s neat, as financial planning geeks, to see how the best practices continue to evolve for financial planning. A decade or more ago we would collect a lot of information, run spreadsheets, use hand-held calculators, make assumptions, and present clients with a forecast of where we think they're headed. This was more of a one time “let me run the numbers and get back to you” sort of exercise, and we did adjust them periodically.
Then we realized that having the clients in the room with us while we were doing the planning made a lot more sense. After all, nobody knows better than you what's most important and how you think your input assumptions are projected to change. As with any forecast, garbage in, garbage out, so this dramatically improved the accuracy of our findings. It also made it easy to update the plan in meetings together, discuss what might have changed, and ask questions of the data. Such as, what if we sell the cabin in ten years, would that help our chances?
Flash forward to today, and we have figured out a way to create that experience in the conference room while we're working together and “gamify it.” This allows you to not only review with us in person but check at home, verify accuracy, make adjustments, do “what-if” scenarios, etc. So, no longer do you need to have to have a formal meeting in order to make small adjustments. This is financial planning in line with today’s advanced technology!
Now please don't get me wrong - I love for you to come in and go over the numbers together. I still think people are much more likely to engage in the process and get it done with some help. But people are busy, and sometimes we're right behind the dentist in terms of desirability for a checkup. Especially when the market is not doing well.
Like a Fitbit this new technology gives you the opportunity to dynamically monitor your retirement progress and other goals, like college savings, travel, and more. This is not just cool, it has the ability to make a big impact on peoples' lives. One of the things that we are thinking about as a metric of our success as planners is how many people we can help to get on track to meet their retirement goals. Ultimately, this is the most important thing. Everything else is secondary. We want as many people to be okay in retirement as possible.
If you'd like to get started, it's pretty easy and kind of fun, and we’d love to help you.
Thanks for taking a look!
Tom Gartner, MSAPM, CFP®
This article represents opinions of the authors and not those of their firm and are subject to change from time to time, and do not constitute a recommendation to purchase and sale any security nor to engage in any particular investment or legal strategy. The information contained here has been obtained from sources believed to be reliable but cannot be guaranteed for accuracy.