Famous football coach Lou Holtz once said, “Pressure is what you feel when you are not prepared.” Retirement Income Planning (also the title of one of my books) is about preparation… not procrastination.
In continuing to make my financial planning practice better and more valuable for my clients, I keep adding new capabilities, important services, and hopefully, good, relevant, and interesting information over time.
BUT… in this blog post, I want to offer you a new and free resource. It’s an easy way for you to see “how ready” you are to retire and NOT outlive your money. In 9 simple steps (10 minutes), you can get a 10,000-foot view of how close you are to reaching your retirement income goals.
Introducing – “Retire – Ready Or NOT”
CLICK the link below for FREE access to our consumer software website (courtesy of my company, PROACTIVE Tax Planning, LLC).
And you can edit and change your inputs (change your desired retirement MONTHLY income or MONTHLY expenses, retire earlier or later, file for Social Security at different ages, change inflation rates, changes in tax rates, use various returns on your savings, Social Security COLAs, etc.) unlimited times.
Again – EVERY figure should be MONTHLY (unless otherwise noted). If you don’t use monthly figures, you may end up having $15 million left at age 100.
Truth be told, you could spend hours with this software if you wanted to and/or come back to it as often as you’d like. Of course, all of your inputs are secure and protected (although NO account info nor any personal financial info is even asked for… beyond your date of birth for obvious reasons).
So, in a nutshell, we’ve enabled you to access part of the front end of our powerful retirement income software. Of course, the results you’ll see are only as valid as your assumptions and planning experience. Garbage in… garbage out.
Hint: Don’t use 10% annual investment returns or unreasonable Social Security COLAs, etc.
But it’s the same exact software that we use to make much more detailed retirement income plans. It enables us to look at various planning scenarios and come up with the retirement income “roadmaps” that I’ve been designing for years.
However, you’re only getting access to about 4% of the software’s power. For example, our back-end functionality enables me to see the adverse or positive effect on my client’s retirement success from all types of financial pressures such as the sequence of returns risk while drawing income from your savings or changing the order of withdrawals from one’s different accounts.
Keep in mind that the results are a 10,000-foot view report.
That basic report shows (based on your information and own assumptions) if you will run out of money or not. Of course, you can go back and change your assumptions and run unlimited scenarios/reports with my compliments.
IF your initial report gives you a rosy outlook – and that’s great — you must have saved a lot and/or have relatively moderate monthly retirement income needs. But how realistic was it? How much better could it be? Could you lower your lifetime taxes? Leave a bigger legacy to family or charity?
And, of course, your limited access to the software made no allowance for sequence of returns risk, potential ROTH conversions, improve the order withdrawals from accounts, surging health care costs and Medicare premiums, the early death of a spouse, LTC expenses, rising taxes, etc.
As the owner of this software, I can do all of the above and much more.
Suppose you would like to see the exact steps for improving your financial future (e.g., a higher lifestyle, more travel or fun, de-risking your retirement income as much as possible, leaving more to your children, grandchildren, and/or charity).
In that case, that’s what my 20-year experience and full access to the software allow me to do for my client’s benefit.
After you are done playing with the software and want some more help, just let me know.
If you’d like to learn more about how I prepare a comprehensive “retirement
income roadmaps,” along with solid recommendations to add certainty, reduce risk and taxes, and show you our 25-40 page retirement reports (income roadmaps) to help ensure you reach your financial goals; I’d be happy to discuss this with you as well. Of course, we can discuss my professional planning fee at that time, too, and you can judge whether what I do fits with what you are looking for in securing a better-improved retirement with less stress.
Let me know if you have any questions, OK?
I can also stress-test my plans to see “what if” one spouse passes on in a certain year or needs expensive LTC services. And how might any ROTH conversions help your plan succeed – even if tax rates don’t rise?
Anyway, have fun experiencing the software!!
You can access our software and see what your retirement looks like at my website:
For what this access costs you (it’s free), you’ll have a lot of computing power at your fingertips. I hope that you will take advantage of this and learn more about how well you are prepared for the retirement lifestyle that you dream about!
Have fun with it… Mark
PS — And as a THANK YOU for reading this blog post, you may also share this FREE retirement planning website with your family, friends, and colleagues.