Wealth Management

What do you think of, when you think about retirement? Do you think about going someplace warm for the winter, owning a beach house, visiting family and friends, or traveling the world? Retirement is meant to be the best years of your life. But, you need to plan for it. With fewer companies offering pension plans and a lot of uncertainty about the reliability of Social Security, it is more important than ever to plan for your own retirement, and a sound plan starts by defining your income needs throughout retirement.

Our goal is to help you create a tax-smart retirement income plan that includes the necessities as well as the little luxuries that make life worth living. Additionally, we need to understand the larger expenses you plan on making during retirement such as that retirement trip that you’ve been waiting for, the downsizing of your current home or maybe even the purchase of a second home.

Once we understand the income you want during retirement, we can now look at the retirement income options you have available, starting with your employer’s pension plans. We will advise you on your options contained within your employer’s plan, letting you know the pros and cons of these options, allowing you to make a more informed decision for you and your family.

Next, we advise you on one of the most important financial decisions you will make during retirement and that’s when and how to elect your Social Security benefits. With half of Americans 65 and older relying on Social Security for at least 50 percent of their family income, making the wrong choices when it comes to claiming your Social Security benefits could drastically change how you live in retirement.

The last step is determining how to most tax efficiently withdraw the remaining income you need from your retirement accounts.

“Since IRAs were first established, the only thing most advisors and investors have worried about is how to get money into them. Now, with baby boomers entering their retirement years, and once-secure pensions disappearing, investors will have to change their focus. The real issue now is how to get money out of their IRAs correctly without losing an undue amount to taxes or penalties,” Mr. Slott said. “There are very few advisors that even know what to look for,” says Slott.

Phil has trained under Ed Slott in his Master Elite IRA Advisor Group. Elite Advisors are not your average Financial Advisors. Folks think that if they are with a big broker, a big bank, or a Mutual Fund company, their advisor is up to speed with all the changing information coming into play. This is not always the case.

Your investments should have a specific place and purpose where they fit properly into your tax-smart retirement plan. However, without a complete review of your personal situation, risk tolerance, income needs, tax situation, long-term care needs, and estate and charitable desires, no one can or should have an opinion on whether a specific product is right for you. The discovery of your true desires and needs should be the first step, not the choice of investment products.

With the understanding gained by going through the Income Planning and Advanced Tax Planning processes, we can now start to determine which investment options could be right for your situation and where they would best fit in your plan.

“Rule No. 1: Never Lose Money. Rule No. 2: Never Forget Rule No. 1.” – Warren Buffett

In these turbulent times, investment management is critical, especially for individuals considering retirement in the near future or already in retirement. A significant loss in the years just prior to and/or just after you retire can have a damaging impact on the level of income you receive over the course of your life.

We manage investments with a 21st century approach to protect against market downturns. Instead of relying on stock selection and asset allocation to limit risk, we offer a mix of modern tactical institutional managers, hedged equity, high probability option strategies, fixed indexed annuities, structured notes & market-linked CDs that are designed to protect against the downside and succeed in all markets: bull, bear and neutral. We seek to maintain a risk-managed approach toward investing looking at performance through a complete market cycle.

All of our investment strategies are then stress tested gauging the potential risk and opportunities before they unfold using advanced statistical relationship modeling between economic levers and our investment recommendations. Through this advanced technology we are able to model the impact of recessions, crises, and other economic events, using historical research and analysis on how economic indicators are correlated and their potential effects on your investments. The Federal Reserve uses similar technology when examining a bank’s balance sheet and cash flow, stress testing them under a range of economic assumptions.