In Part One, we covered picturing your ideal retirement and how a trusted financial planner can help you achieve it. This blog covers in greater detail how to optimize your planning process and relationship with a financial planner.
But consider what’s at stake. Controlling what level of lifestyle you and your family will enjoy for many years, along with your financial legacy, will be determined by what financial decisions you make now. Picturing and planning your retirement with an expert financial planner means you’ll know what to do financially now and along the way, so you can take preventative measures, not reactionary ones.
Just as you want to know all of a patient’s symptoms and test results before making a diagnosis, the more your financial planning partner knows about all aspects of your life, the more those variables in your life will be taken into consideration. While divulging so much may feel uncomfortable, establishing and maintaining a high level of trust enables planners to give the very best advice and create the most effective plans.
Picture Your Retirement
Start by picturing the lifestyle you want to lead: Is it comparable to the one you lead now? Is it downsized? Or is it expanded in some areas, such as travel?
Now ask yourself, what if I want to:
- Retire early?
- Sell my home and move to another state?
- Live in Maine and live in NYC? Or in a quaint town in Italy?
- Support my children through graduate school?
- Follow my passion for fine art?
- Establish a foundation?
An advantage of planning financially for retirement with a physician lifestyle planner is that they’ll monitor these “what ifs” every year. Those can change and, equally as importantly, new solutions to achieve them can arise.
What Is Your Comfort Level?
To help you articulate the retirement lifestyle you want to achieve, an expert financial planner begins a guided conversation about assets, intentions and family issues. They have the experience to help you think through your needs on multiple levels, going beyond what you want to do in retirement to examine how you want to feel. That makes you more aware of the financial choices you have to make and how to be more comfortable making them.
That means:
- Having confidence in your financial decisions, long-term and on a monthly basis
- Understanding the pros and cons of making a particular decision
- Enjoying security knowing you have a plan and you’re working the plan everyday
- Recognizing a sense of clarity and achievement
More Than Income, Insurance And Investments
These conversations require trust. You’ll need to know the good and the bad to be aware of opportunities and potential trap doors, with an eye to more than just your income, insurance and investments. That’s important because with transparency on both sides, you’ll picture more than your desired retirement lifestyle. You’ll have a plan that is fully informed, tailored to you and can allow you handle your finances, without thinking or worrying about them.
For example, an advanced specialist, who, with his physician spouse, enjoyed a seven-figure annual income. They’d assumed that between savings and a wide range of investments, they could afford the retirement they wanted. A candid conversation with an expert financial planning partner revealed that wasn’t the case. Fortunately, working with their partner, they learned which adjustments to make and discovered tax savings that could help put them back on track.
Time To Plan—Plan To Make Time
If you’re one of the many physicians behind in retirement planning, starting a conversation with an expert planner can take under an hour. And creating clarity about what your retirement will look like—and what that requires—helps ensure success for years to come.
With this overview of picturing your retirement, learn more about the next step: How to plan it. Stay tuned for Part Two.
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Asset Allocation neither assures a profit nor protects against a loss in a declining market. Consult your own personal attorney legal or tax counsel for advice on specific legal and tax matters.