Navigating the Unique Financial Planning Challenges & Opportunities for Near-Term Retirees
You’re finally feeling ready both emotionally and financially to start thinking more seriously about retirement. Congrats! That’s a huge milestone and we’re excited to potentially be the firm that helps you transition into this vital next chapter of your life.
At Progress Wealth Management, we take pride in the fact that we’ve helped literally thousands of people live happy, healthy, and confident retirements throughout our careers and we can help you, too.
As non-commissioned experts, you can depend on us to give you unbiased, expert advice and hold your hand at every step of the way to ensure you feel comfortable as a result of having a professional by your side.
Here are a few things we help retirees with:
Knowing When to Retire
One of the toughest decisions for hard-working people is quitting your stable, high-paying, and potentially gratifying job. Leaving that security can get emotional for some people but when it’s time to retire, it’s time. We’ll help you to understand when you can afford to retire and how to make the transition simple and smooth.
Getting Organized
There’s a lot of “new” info to consider — from adjusting your investments to creating a specific plan to generate income to following rules the IRS sets – Let us help
Investing
We provide our clients with tax-sensitive, tailored portfolios to help ensure their assets are managed in a tax-sensitive way but without losing out on performance. Without a tax-sensitive non-retirement account, it can create problems with everything from Medicare, Social Security or just plain wasting money on taxes.
Medicare
We’ll help you through the whole Medicare application process including picking out what Medicare Advantage, Medicare Supplement and/or Medicare Part D you’ll need to buy in order to ensure your medical costs in retirement are predictable, affordable and expected.
Social Security
When you file for Social Security is the single most important decision in your retirement plan. We’ll help you to understand when you should file for social security and the risks involved so you know how affordable your whole retirement plan is.
Risk Management
We want to ensure all of retirees sleep soundly at night knowing that whatever their lives as retirees might throw at them, they’ll be prepared. This might include inflation, a cut to social security, major medical bills, a poorly performing stock market or a slew of other things. Whatever risks you’re concerned with, tell us and let us help.
Taxes
We’ll review each option available and ensure you’re not taking too much risk. This might include bonds, dividend-paying stocks, an annuity, or some other strategy.
We’ll help you answer all of these questions and more. As a result, you’ll feel comfortable knowing what to expect and what you’ll do at each step of the way to ensure you’re not a burden on your loved ones, and you won’t have to sacrifice or live on a tight budget.
Questions Retirees should be asking themselves:
Should you hire a financial planner or an investment manager?
The reality is, it really depends. Some people say they need help with better understanding the nuances of medicare, taxes, estate planning, investing, and retirement income planning.
Other people say they’re happy to just find someone who keeps things incredibly simple and just invests their money.
Most retirees, however, admit that they probably do need help with more than just investing and would benefit from hiring an expert to help them with all the nuances of their financial life.
Should I hire a commissioned advisor or a non-commissioned one?
Unfortunately, the majority of financial advisors out there are paid on commission to sell products. This might include insurance, investments, or a slew of other things. Sometimes, it’s not a problem at all because their clients need help regardless and wants to buy the investing product so why not earn the commission?
The downside of working with a commissioned advisor is, that they have major conflicts of interest that can impact the quality of your advice. For example, if you hired a doctor to make you healthy and they recommended you buy a certain pharmaceutical despite the fact there were better alternatives because they made a commission, would you be happy with that? Of course not.
What makes this worse is, that the advice you get from a financial advisor isn’t a one-time thing. You may need ongoing advice, guidance, counsel, and support at every step throughout your life to help you reach your goals and secure your future. If the advisor has already sold you on a product, what incentive do they have to continue helping you? They may be the most good-natured person, ever but they need to pay their bills no different than you do.
This is why at Progress Wealth Management, we are non-commissioned (fee-only) financial advisors and are proud of this fact. Our clients trust us because we have nothing to sell other than the fact that they should work with us.
Retirement Income Planning: What does that mean?
Most people know that retirees need income to replace what they made when they were working in order to pay for their lifestyle but the question is, how best to generate it?
Sometimes we may use annuities (despite the fact we’re non-commissioned), bonds, dividend-paying stocks, or a few other methods depending on your circumstances, goals, timeframe, and risk tolerance.
It’s important to find an advisor who’s capable of providing the help you need.
What is a Certified Financial Planner and why are people saying I should work with one?
Becoming a Certified Financial Planner is a grueling process that requires in-depth knowledge of tax, investing, insurance, annuities, Medicare, Social Security, budgeting, debt and so much more. This is the reason why the CFP is considered the gold standard for advisors. It proves you’ve got the knowledge to be a good advisor and it proves you’re a fiduciary (because the CFP board requires it).
Keep in mind that there’s a lot more to being a good financial advisor than just having the knowledge. Good financial advisors have the emotional intelligence to counsel you through tough times in life, the analytic ability to research tax-code and find opportunities to save their clients money and the bravery to contact their clients during good and bad times to ensure their financial success at every stage in life.
