Imagine you are a field goal kicker in football. Imagine lining up for your most important kick of your career. How many practice kicks do you want to have taken by the time you get to this point? 10? 50? 200? 10,000?
What if you had never kicked a field goal in your life? How do you feel now?
This bizarre lack of preparedness would be unheard of in sports. Yet people do it every day in another domain, one that will impact their lives for much longer then football game.
People retire.
Have you ever thought about this? Sure, you may have thought of retirement. But have you ever thought about that concept that you file for Social Security exactly once. You leave your company once. You sell your business once (some exceptions to this, and we’ll cover this in a future series on exit planning). If you or your spouse have a pension or an annuity, you turn on the income from these resources exactly one time.
You don’t get to try it out, see how it feels, take a practice run, mess up and do it over. You get to do this once.
It doesn’t quite seem fair, does it?
We don’t think so either. That’s why in our process, we help you discover, prepare and act on key aspects of your retirement, well before you have to commit to a course of action. Here’s how we do this.
Discover
How much money will you need to sustain your standard of living in retirement? How much do you have right now? What is the gap between the two? How would inflation, fed policy, tax policy, volatility in the stock market, or any other factor affect your likelihood of success here?
The point of the discovery phase is to answer these questions. In this phase, we identify your goals and resources, as well as any gaps between the two that need to be closed before you move into retirement.
Prepare
Next, we work to close the gaps. No big shocker here. If your plan relies on a liquidity event from the sale of a business, you better believe we are helping you prepare for this, and not just blindly assume it’s going to fall into place. If it becomes evident that your plan is too dependent on Social Security for success, we help you identify ways of shoring this up.
But this stage isn’t just about financial preparedness. It is also about personal preparedness. Far too often, entrepreneurs overlook the personal vision, for what life looks like post business transition. Maybe you’re not a business owner, but your career has still comprised a great deal of your time as well as your relationships. What are you going to do when you’re no longer devoting 35 to 50 hours per week with these people in pursuit of these goals? These are fundamental questions to ask yourself, and to prepare for.
Decide and execute
At some point, you may actually decide to retire. This is when the preparation comes into play. This is where theory becomes practice, and we implement the strategies that we have set the stage to execute.
Bringing it all together
Contrary to the kicker with no practice, we like to help you prepare for these key moments in the game of your life.
If this is making sense to you, we might be wise to have a conversation together. Let’s chat about your vision, the obstacles that stand in the way of it, the opportunities you want to capitalize on, and the advantages you have working in your favor to get there.