Retirement Planning

Giving You A Clear Roadmap To Your Future

Retirement is a major milestone in the life of most people. But it’s also one of the single biggest stressors many people face. Why? Because retirement, today, is quite possibly more uncertain than it’s ever been in the history of this country. At Strait & Sound, we believe retirement planning is an essential service for achieving complete financial independence. We believe that a thoughtful and disciplined long-term strategy can help most people retire comfortably, where they never have to worry about money again, given a reasonable lifestyle.

Yet, many people are concerned that they’ll have enough money to do everything they want to do in retirement, without depleting all of their financial resources. This concern is well-founded. Most people know it can be very difficult to predict all of the expenses they will encounter over the next five years, let alone 25 years or more in retirement. Add escalating long-term care expenses into the picture and it’s no wonder people worry.

Many corporations have sought to alleviate this concern by offering retirement planning services and programs, such as a 401k. While these programs are important, and we encourage people to participate in them, they are not, by themselves, a complete retirement solution. Retirement planning is a close cousin to Financial Planning. Both of these disciplines are designed to ensure that the ideal future a person wants to live actually comes true.

At Strait & Sound, we believe retirement planning is about creating a roadmap to your future, a roadmap that you can be confident in. No two clients receive exactly the same roadmap from us because each client is unique. We put time and energy into understanding what your ideal future looks like. We also analyze the likelihood of achieving that ideal future, given the resources and goals you are trying to achieve. Then we recommend a custom plan, tailored to your specific needs.

What Our Clients Want From Retirement

At Strait & Sound, our professional advisors have been guiding clients in retirement planning for more than two decades. This has given us a seasoned perspective on what most people seem to want from their retirement years. See if what we are about to describe sounds familiar to you.

• Freedom. This is the overarching feeling that people seem to want to experience in retirement. They want to be free to make their own schedules, do what they want to do with their time and to be free from the worries and conflicts that come with being a working professional.
• Travel. Many of our clients want to get “out of the box” they’ve been in for most of their adult life – their office or place of work. They want to experience other cultures, lands, sights and sounds, culinary delights and the wonders that come with seeing just how big and beautiful this world can be.
• Lifestyle. Our clients want to continue to live the comfortable lifestyle that they’ve grown accustomed to through their working years. They don’t want to be forced to enact austerity measures to prevent the depletion of their wealth. They also don’t want to be forced to sell their real estate, particularly for those living on the US West Coast, to move to a less expensive region of the country.
• Family. Many clients want to be more involved with their family than they were allowed to be during their working years. They want to help children and grandchildren get established in life. They want to be fully present for the big moments, like graduations, birthday parties, buying a first-home, weddings and births.
• Health. Our clients want to be as healthy as they can be for as long as possible. This not only improves their quality of life, it also prevents them from spending long periods away from home and family and prevents wealth erosion from big health bills.
• Wealth. They want their wealth to remain strong throughout their living years and to outlive them. Some of our clients actually want their wealth to increase during retirement years by investing in strategies where the growth outpaces their spending needs.
• Heirs. Not all of our clients have heirs. But for those who do, taking care of heirs is a major goal. Many of our clients want to help their adult children get established in life, particularly by helping with a down-payment on a home. Passing wealth to heirs in the most tax-efficient manner possible is also important.
• Charities. Many of our clients are charitably inclined. But they want to be smart about how they help the charities they support. This means they are looking for ways to maximize their gifts and to avoid taxes on the gifts wherever possible.

If these sound like your goals, then you’ve come to the right place. We are experts at helping clients realize these dreams and have been doing so for many years.