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Retirement Planning > Retirement Investing

6 steps to a retirement plan

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When was the last time you thought about your role in your clients’ life and how what you do impacts their lives? Do you find ways to help your client protect their net worth and accomplish some or all of their financial objectives?

If so, how do you do this? Do you consider all questions, information and advice as it impacts and is impacted by your client’s entire financial and life situation? Do you look at various aspects of your clients’ personal financial situation, including retirement planning, risk management and insurance planning, tax planning, estate planning and business succession planning (for business owners)?

If you haven’t considered all these areas you might want to look at these steps and issues that may be important to your clients to ensure that the things that have become staples in their lives don’t become luxuries as they grow older.

Step 1: Setting goals with the client. This step (that is usually performed in conjunction with Step 2) is meant to identify where your client wants to go in terms of his finances and life.

Step 2: Gathering relevant information on the client. This would include the qualitative and quantitative aspects of your client’s financial and relevant non-financial situation.

Step 3: Analyzing the information. The information gathered is analyzed so that your client’s situation is properly understood. This includes determining whether there are sufficient resources to reach your client’s goals and what those resources are.

Step 4: Constructing a financial plan. Based on the understanding of what your client wants in the future and their current financial status, a roadmap to your client goals is drawn to facilitate the achievements of those goals.

Step 5: Implementing the strategies in the plan. Guided by the financial plan, the strategies outlined in the plan are implemented using the resources allocated for the purpose.

Step 6: Monitoring implementation and reviewing the plan. The implementation process is closely monitored to ensure it stays in alignment to your client’s goals. Periodic reviews are undertaken to check for misalignment and changes in your client’s situation. If there is any significant change to your client’s situation, the strategies and goals in their financial plan are revised accordingly.

Next week, we’ll look at some of important components in constructing a retirement plan.

For more from Lloyd Lofton, see:


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