The Four C’s of Retirement

Allianz launched on Wednesday an interactive website to help investors who are between five and 10 years away from retirement. The website focuses on the “4 C’s” of retirement, four concepts that form a process that can help pre-retirees in the transition to retirement: clarity, comfort, cost of living and certainty.

“Retirement objectives change over time. A person may spend 30 years accumulating assets but then may not know how to convert those assets during the transition period into a stream of long-term guaranteed income,” Gary Bhojwani, chairman of Allianz Life and author of a white paper on the four C’s, said in a statement.

The four C’s process takes its inspiration from the diamond industry, where consumers were “trained” to think about diamonds in the context of clarity, color, cut and carat. The white paper notes that this method is so successful because it helps break down a complex subject (and no one can argue that retirement planning isn’t complex) into simpler and easy-to-remember pieces.

“This simple, descriptive and memorable concept identifies the critical retirement questions that must be answered to begin the pivoting process from accumulation to income,” Bhojwani added.

In the Clarity phase, pre-retirees address basic questions about their future, such as how much they expect to spend in retirement compared with their current spending level.