Today, I want to share with you something today that we put together called the 10 Steps to a Better Retirement and just to let you know, we are a firm that specializes for retirees that are transitioning from work life to retirement life. We specialize in the IRA rollover arena.

This special guide was derived out of a simple question that we wanted to answer, and that question is, “What do you do with what you have so you do not run out of your retirement money when you actually do retire.” And so to get started, I’m just going to touch on two steps out of the ten that I think will give you a flavor for what’s in this report and hopefully that will help you moving forward. So the first thing we want to touch on is, what financial phase are you in?

1. Accumulation phase
There’s an accumulation phase as well as a distribution or retirement phase, and so the accumulation phase is when obviously you’re accumulating money, you’re working. And this phase, really what happens in the market, if you lose money, it’s not really a big deal. And the reason for that is because you’re continuing to add money to your portfolios, your retirement, your 401k, whatever that might be, and you’re building those versus if you have the distribution phase, it’s a little bit of different because there’s another added level of risk that’s going to come into play on that.

2. Distribution phase
One of those risks that you encounter is something called the sequence of return risk. And what that means to you is it’s not dependent on the rate of return that you earn. It’s not dependent on the loss that occurs in your portfolio when you are in retirement. Rather, it really focuses in on when a loss occurs.

Case Study

In this report, go through an example to give you an idea of how someone that has a loss early in retirement versus someone who does not… They’re pulling out retirement income at the same levels. They have the same exact rate of return. And the one who encountered that loss actually ran out of money versus the other one who did not. So this is a big deal that you want to be aware of as you assemble your retirement strategies.

3. Retirement perspective & goal changes

Another piece or another step that we looked at is your investment perspective. This one is one that focuses on really shifting your perspective from rate of return to actually making or generating income from your portfolio. You see, as you get into the distribution years, now you need to start to look at how the different income categories you may have… For example, Social Security, pensions. You may have rental income. A lot of you will have your investments that will produce dividends and interest. 

We need to determine how all of those things come together for your goal, which is retirement income. And so you really want to understand that your rate of return is not where you want to focus on. More importantly, you want to focus on now, as you go into retirement and transition there and rollover your 401Ks, etc., what type of reliable income can be set up and produced.