Simplify
How Can We Help to Simplify Your Life?
1. We help you do some goal setting exercises to think “outside the box” as to what your ideal life would look like. This helps simplify things and not let the day to day distractions keep you from doing what you need to do today to create a better life for you and your family. It helps you spend quality time focusing on the things and people that really matter to you.
2. Many baby boomers and retirees are worried their savings aren't enough to pay for the lifestyle they are used to. We help you explore changes to “right size” your life both before and after retirement to give you more time and money for the people and activities you enjoy which add meaning to your life. This may be as simple as helping you reprioritize what you do with your money.
3. “Rightsizing” your life before or after retirement may involve discussing whether it makes sense for you to downsize to a smaller home with lower maintenance, tax and utility costs, to refinance or to do a reverse mortgage. Smaller homes can take significantly less time and money to maintain.
4. We may explore whether there is anything you enjoy doing that has less stress and more flexible hours that you could do longer to help you retire from your normal job earlier.
5. We follow a disciplined investment strategy with longer term buy/sell rules to reduce your financial stress and simplify investing.
6. The Retirement Bucket Analysis helps you to better budget risk. It simplifies the decision of how much investment risk you can afford to take and how much we should invest in conservative liquid investments, moderate risk investments, and riskier investments. It also helps you sleep better at night.
7. Using longer term buy/sell signals allows us to allocate more money to investments that protect your purchasing power. Combined with tax efficient investing and Social Security and retirement planning, this can make a significant difference in your after-tax cash flows over time.
Higher after-tax cash flows help simplify your life by allowing you to spend less time doing things you don’t enjoy like cleaning your house or finding ways to cut back spending to save more money. It also reduces your financial stress which helps your relationships and your health. This will be increasingly important going forward as traditional sources of retirement income buy less and both costs and taxes rise.
8. For our retired clients, we prepare a ten year cash flow estimate that shows what you need to withdraw from your portfolio each year (including taxes) to fund your lifestyle. Having this kind of visibility helps simplify things and shows you which expenses are having the biggest impact. It helps you focus more of your spending on things that are important to you instead of on stuff you used to need to make up for working long hours with high stress. It helps you make better decisions and feel more in control.
9. We simplify the life of our retired clients by helping serve as their “private pension fund manager”. This helps them spend less time figuring out how much they can safely withdraw from their portfolio each year, what investments they need to sell from which accounts to fund their withdrawals, and helps them minimize the taxes they trigger from these withdrawals. This reduces the complexity of your finances and saves you time.
10. Knowing that your portfolio is anchored by dividend growth stocks that should earn growing cash flows even if the market goes sideways another 8 years helps you worry less and simplifies replenishing your cash flow reserves.
11. We tend to be very cynical about what Wall Street tells investors. We give you objective advice as to where the financial markets and economy are heading and communicate with our clients frequently when market risk is high. We do our best to simplify all the conflicting data.