Find a Retirement Financial Advisor Who Specializes in Helping You Make Your Money Last

Retirement is something you’ve never faced before, with a lot of one-time decisions you can never reverse. Working with a retirement-focused advisor can help you avoid mistakes during this huge transition.

When you’re looking for good retirement-focused financial advisors, you want to start with the basics. Make sure they have their Certified Financial Planner (CFP®) designation and either the Retirement Management Advisor (RMA®) or Retirement Income Certified Professional (RICP®) designations. You should also ask them for references to other clients facing retirement and look at their website: does it address the issues you are facing?

You should plan for retirement well before your retirement date. Many people retire before they expected, and you will fare much better if you have a plan ahead of time. There may be many decisions that affect your retirement that come up along the way, such as making sure you’re maximizing your vacation pay rules (sometimes you can move this money tax-free into a Health Reimbursement Arrangement), or your pension (learning your formula and maximizing it helps). You don’t want to miss out on benefits because you waited until just before retirement to do the research.

I see a lot of clients struggle with being able to see the entire picture and knowing where they’re at financially and how close (or far) they are from retirement. Thus, organization and clarity are by far the two most important elements to every plan.

Before any technical work can begin, we must start first with identifying what an ideal retirement looks like and then get an inventory of where each person or family is starting from.

Our process starts with framing the intention of our work together by going into a series of intentional questions designed to zero in on what’s most important to each person. Though every plan and each client’s situation and circumstances are different, the process and outcome remain the same.

Once we’ve identified their purpose and vision, we can then begin to comb through statements, documents, and tax returns to begin organizing their picture, consolidating accounts, and simplifying the complex.

Last, we present multiple options and recommendations for clients to choose from as we believe financial planning is a collaborative process and each plan has many ways towards achieving a successful outcome.

Planning for retirement is all we do. It’s all we think about and all we read about.

By narrowing our focus to only work with individuals and families preparing for retirement, allows us to go much deeper in our planning work than most traditional firms that serve a wide array of clients.

We have created an entire process dedicated to centering around all the major events one would need to think about in preparing for the years leading up to retirement such as how to pay less in taxes throughout your entire lifetime, how to build an investment account so that you don’t outlive your money, creating a coordinated withdrawal strategy to the timing of Social Security and Pensions and last, understanding the impact of Medicare, taxes and new legislative changes.

Communication and teamwork are critical. It takes an entire village worth of professionals to get our clients to retirement. We help to assemble a team around our clients or partner together to work with their existing relationships to collaborate and all get on the same page for our clients.

In working with CPA’s, we are actively communicating to work on reducing their lifetime taxable income by figuring out where the timing of various tax planning techniques like Roth Conversions, Donor Advised Funds or Charitable Trusts make sense.

Throughout the year, we continue to be a second set of eyes on tax returns, discuss current tax thresholds and monitor how future changes to Income or Retirement dates will impact Medicare thresholds, possible deductions, or the timing of Social Security.

With respect to Estate Planning, we are actively involved in the discussion and the implementation of Trust, Wills, and various Estate Gifting vehicles.

Each year we review our client’s current Estate Plan to ensure accuracy and verify that their wishes were drafted correctly and that all of their assets and beneficiary continue to match.

Each circumstance is unique, and it all comes down to the relationship we have with the family and the children. It is our promise to always provide guidance and counsel to our client’s children, especially during a time of transition and loss.

Through our process, it is very common for us to be in contact with our client’s children and have an established relationship with them.

Thus, if there’s a mutual fit and a relationship, then yes, it’s very common for children of clients to continue working with us. We understand that not every situation makes sense, nonetheless, we always strive to make ourselves available and provide prudent advice in the process.

For many, retirement has been thought of as the end of work and a transition to a life focused on leisure. However, with increased life expectancy, this traditional definition of retirement is changing, and retirement is now viewed as another life chapter during which an individual retires from a current job or career but does not exit the workforce.

Nearly half of current retirees say have either worked or plan to do so in retirement, while close to 70% of pre-retirees plan to work during retirement, which impacts retirement planning and taxes. Increasingly, I have been having conversations with clients around work during retirement. At Client First Capital, we have created a Next Decade Workbook to help our clients discover their goals for the next decade, including balancing work with life experiences.

A common misconception is that financial advisors only manage investment portfolios and that if you have met your retirement savings goal, then the value of a financial advisor decreases. However, a strong financial advisor provides guidance on other key factors during retirement such as a tax-efficient withdrawal strategy, estate planning, and charitable giving.

When considering financial advisors, it is also critical to ensure that your advisor adheres to the fiduciary standard, meaning that he/she will put your interests ahead of their own. At Client First Capital, we adhere to the fiduciary standards set by the Certified Financial Planner (CFP) and Certified Financial Analyst (CFA) institutions.

Client First Capital uses an integrated approach to wealth management. We rely on our deep knowledge and insight around best practices for wealth management to build and execute highly-tailored, comprehensive, and dynamic financial strategies.

Our integrated approach to wealth management lies at the intersection of investments, taxes, risk planning, and estate planning. As a family advisor, we are best positioned to understand how decisions impact all four of these areas.