The Power of a Written Plan
Business owners and CEO’s have written business plans. Ship captains chart their courses on nautical maps and doctors have written treatment plans for their patients. What these and most successful people all have in common is that they have written plans of action that provide them with goals and direction for a clearly defined outcome – written plans that likely lead to the results they expect to achieve. Planning for retirement is critical and no different from any other detailed process or objective.
Whether you’re in your forties, fifties or sixties it’s time to (develop) create a written retirement plan. It’s never too late and almost never too early, but if you’re just five to ten years out from retirement it’s crucial that you do so. Often spouses assume that they share similar retirement goals and objectives. However they miss opportunities they never take the time to discuss or actually do the formal planning necessary for a secure, satisfying second phase in life. It may be hard to imagine, but many people spend more time planning summer vacations than they do retirement.
Creating a plan can be an eye opening experience. It can show that yes I do have enough for retirement, or no I don’t and I need to make sacrifices now. It helps them to make hard (educated) choices. It allows people to be in reality of where they are financially and provides them with the strategies and tools to get to the place they really want to be. Written retirement plans provide you with power. Knowledge is power.
A written plan may help you to be a better saver; plus it can have a big impact on how you secure your feel in retirement. A lot of people may retire and they’re afraid of spending their money believing they may run out, so they hoard it. Without a written plan that’s monitored and updated periodically you’re likely to have a lot of anxiety about what can happen. The written plan helps take away that anxiety. If you don’t have a plan you can blow through your savings or you can spend too conservatively and have a retirement that’s really below what you deserve and what you worked all your life for.
Foundationally, the written plan should tell you how much it’s going to take to maintain the lifestyle you want in retirement and provide you with a course of action to achieve it. It may also consider income planning, social security strategy, tax planning as relates to retirement, estate planning, legacy planning and healthcare planning involving Medicare and long term care.
Our planning process always begins the same way by listening to our client’s dreams, goals and vision for the future. Once we know you and who you are, we can begin to educate about options and strategies relating to you (that allow you to feel secure about the future). We know that no client is the same and we tailor their plan to utilize their particular resources and needs.
According to the Retirement Research Institute at Boston College, having a written retirement plan dramatically increases your odds of experiencing the retirement you dream about in your working years. Another way to say that is with retirement, failure to plan is planning to fail. Written plans make all the difference.