We can help you prepare for the future with a financial plan designed especially for you. A good financial plan is a blueprint that lets you save, spend, invest, manage risk and approach tax and estate planning with confidence.
Assessing Your Financial Plan
1) Does your financial plan provide an investment strategy to help you reach your financial goals and objectives?
The overall success of your financial plan is partly dependent on an appropriate investment recommendation, based on your long-term financial goals and objectives. At Fisher Investments, we take into account everything from your family health history to the specific stocks, bonds or other investments in your portfolio to help build an in-depth understanding of the objectives for your assets. Using tools like portfolio simulations and historical modeling, we can provide an investment recommendation we believe is most likely to help you reach your goals. This recommendation provides the foundation for your future financial success, and may help you avoid running out of money in retirement.
2) Is your financial plan helping to ensure you leave the legacy you want?
Many investors find their investment time horizon may last beyond their lifetime, giving them the opportunity to use their assets to support someone or something important to them. While supplementary to an appropriate investment recommendation, planning for and protecting the future of your wealth are common needs that can be complicated to address. At Fisher Investments, we can provide perspective on tactics and resources available to help ensure what you want to happen, does.
3) Does your financial plan provide perspective on financial planning topics such as Social Security, taxes and insurance?
Many investors want to feel they are making informed and prudent decisions about all aspects of their wealth, not just their investment strategy and legacy. Understanding the relationship between taxes, cash flow requirements, and Social Security benefits may influence how you meet your living expenses both before and after retirement. Additionally, recognizing the connection between your investments and insurance needs (e.g. health, long term care, and annuities) may help you decide whether purchasing coverage is appropriate.
Think Big When Planning Your Retirement Income
When thinking about retirement planning, an important consideration for investors is how much income they’ll be able to generate. It can be scary to think about giving up a paycheck and trusting that your assets will last the rest of your life, or perhaps even beyond. Knowing your retirement investments have the ability to provide enough income to cover at least a significant portion of your expenses is a key to keeping you from outliving your retirement funds.
However, there is significantly more to successful retirement income planning than just looking for how to generate the most income. It’s important to understand holistically what you want to get from your retirement, how you approach managing your finances, and which types of investments you choose to make if you want to create a retirement plan that can support your goals.
Defining Your Retirement Goals
While you could embark on your retirement planning without first defining your retirement goals, it’s easy for this approach to backfire. It’s tempting to simply seek the highest returns, assuming that by amassing as much as you can, you’ll be able to figure out what you want to do once you’re retired. Unfortunately, this can lead you to build pitfalls into your plan—such as taking unnecessary risk or chasing “hot” investments—that can work against you in the long run.
Different goals require drastically different sums to accomplish. For some investors, plans may be aimed solely at maintaining their current lifestyle throughout their sunset years. For others, the goal may be to leave a legacy, requiring a plan that can produce income well past retirement’s end. Being able to define what you want is the first step in being able to estimate your cost of living, which is necessary when you begin planning the income you’ll need for a successful retirement.
Understanding Your Spending
While estimates based on your goals are important as a basis for your planning, you should also calculate the demands of your expenses as you approach retirement to help ensure a smooth transition. These can help you understand how well your planning for larger goals meshes with how you’ll be extracting funds, and what type of adjustments you can make if you find you’re ahead or behind your plan.
This will mean looking at your current costs of living — for example, you’ll certainly want to include:
- Your monthly grocery bill
- Your monthly energy and utilities bill
- Your debts (car loans, credit cards, mortgage)
- Your tax liabilities
- Your insurance and medical costs
- Discretionary spending (movies, TV, books, meals out, travel, etc.)
Remember that some of your costs may change immediately after retirement. For example, if you’re no longer commuting to work, you may well see spending on gas drop. As such, it can be helpful to look at expenses again a few months into your retirement to see how your estimates matched.
In an ideal world, you would be lucky enough to have sufficient retirement income to cover the costs you do have with some room to spare. If so, it may be easier to treat yourself to some of retirement’s non-essential rewards, such as fine wines, a boat, exotic vacations, or a classic automobile, as you’re continuing to see your funds grow. However, it’s wise not to get too comfortable even in this position, as you may find your spending in retirement grow more and more with time.
Professional Portfolio Management
Fisher Investments believes portfolio management is far more than just buying stocks and bonds and hoping they do well. We use a tested “top-down” investment approach combined with personalized planning to build a portfolio tailored to your long-term financial goals. Our proven approach has attracted a global base of over $110 billion* individual and institutional clients.