Today’s financial advice for those navigating retirement is built on yesterday’s principles, consistent saving, risk tolerance, asset allocation. These are all good principles that prepare you for retirement. Yet many of the same principles remain the top priority in a new phase in your financial life – the income phase of retirement.

The Conventional Retirement Advice

With risk tolerance and asset allocation at the forefront, today’s conventional advice creates income strategies through probability based simulation. It sounds scientific, and it is. But what we understand about the income phase is that it tends to draw out many behavioral biases that we have as humans. These biases aren’t bad, they’re natural. But what that does mean is that an income strategy built on fixed assumptions and behaviors doesn’t align with an individual looking to enjoy the final phase of their life. What may look good in financial software, or on a spreadsheet, may not resonate with the people behind these plans – the ones whose effort, their prudent saving and investing to help them reach this point – those people that we are working with when building their strategies.

The New Approach Based on Your Preferences

What if we approached your plan for income in a new way? What if the first question wasn’t about risk tolerance and investment strategy, but first dealt with the lifestyle you want to enjoy throughout retirement? Then, after determining that number, we discussed the level of certainty you want for that lifestyle, sort of like the paycheck that you enjoyed during your working career. A collaborative effort between retiree and advisor to build an income strategy from the ground up based on our natural preferences for income. After establishing that foundation, we then step into conversations about risk and investment strategy that are necessary for long term wealth, maintenance and accumulation. Doesn’t that sort of process make sense?

A Process Tailored to You

The Four Buckets Retirement Income StrategyⓇwas built with retirees in mind and a process that aligns with who they are, as they enter retirement. A process that focuses on your lifestyle and long term goals, gradually moving from plans and purposes to the financial elements needed to make it a reality. But a financial strategy that aligns with your desire for certainty, and your tolerance for risk a marriage of both working from certainty to risk in the proper order to create a retirement income strategy you can feel confident about.

We invite you to learn more about this process and the four buckets framework used to build these retirement income plans.

The education and ideas promoted throughout our different sites and channels is not specific advice, because we don’t yet know who you are. When you’re ready, we are here to build a custom retirement income strategy that aligns with who you are and the path you’re looking to take.