Determine Your Retirement Goals:
Although most Financial Advisors approach Retirement planning as a one-dimensional puzzle to be solved by calculating “the number”, you know it is more complex than that. You have multiple goals, both personal and financial, and a variety of risks surrounding each goal. The HCM Retirement Roadmap process recognizes that your successful retirement requires the attainment of many goals with various levels of prioritization. We help you focus on what is most important, and help you pinpoint, evaluate, and execute the best options for you to be successful.
HCM typically Identifies Five Primary Goal sets:
- Safety Net Reserve: Protection against difficult markets.
- Base Expense Goals: Predictable income for nondiscretionary, recurring expenses.
- Lifestyle Expense Goals: Planned expenses that increase the enjoyment in your life.
- Personal and Family Goals: Providing financial assistance to loved ones.
- Legacy Goals: Multigenerational wealth transfer.
HCM’s proprietary Retirement Roadmap process starts with building investment allocations around the financial goals you specify in the initial phase of your planning process. Our objective is to:
- Fund your Base Goals with predictable income sources, such as interest, dividends, pensions, and Social Security.
- Protect your Lifestyle Goals through market cycles with the HCM Safety Net System™.
- Design a diversified, low-cost, tax-efficient portfolio solution, anchored around our HCM Dividend Growth strategy to help meet your longer-term Personal and Legacy Goals.
Once You’ve Got It Made, Don’t Mess It Up
Once you have achieved financial independence you will want to maintain it. Therefore, a critical part of the planning process is to identify, understand, and disarm the risks to your success.
People face a variety of personal and financial challenges as they age, stop working, and move into retirement. These include but are certainly not limited to:
- Stock and bond market risk
- Inflation / deflation risk
- Health Risk
- Longevity Risk
- Political Risk
- Family Event Risk
During the planning process, you and your HCM Wealth Advisor, along with the HCM Wealth Enhancement Team, will work to identify your risk exposures, understand the financial magnitude of those exposures, and implement strategies to mitigate those risks
Turning Assets Into Income
We spend our working years turning our labor into assets to be saved and used later in life when we are no longer working. This process reverses itself when we retire and need to rely on those assets to generate income for the remainder of our lives. This is why we say that investing in retirement is different.
HCM Clients accumulate many different types of financial assets during their working careers. You may have accumulated wealth within personal investment accounts or an employer sponsored retirement plan, like a 401 (k) or 403(b). You may be entitled to a pension or Social Security. You may have received an inheritance. You may have a substantial portion of your wealth tied up in a business or real estate.
Whatever your current financial situation, there will be efficient and inefficient ways to turn your assets into income. Doing so properly can materially increase your after-tax returns allowing you family’s wealth to go much further. HCM Wealth Advisors can help you evaluate the tax and financial consequences of your various options for turning your assets into income. This will allow you make better decisions to increase the chances of long-term success in your Financial Independence Planning.
“A Goal Without a Plan is Just a Wish” – Antoine de Saint Exupery
Operating within the parameters of a professionally drafted financial plan is an important part of a successful retirement. The identification and prioritization of goals, management of risks, and efficient utilization of resources will help you enjoy your retirement and support your legacy.
Your HCM Wealth Advisor and Wealth Enhancement Team will evaluate your plan under normal market conditions and stress-tested scenarios, including unexpected family events. You will work together to establish spending guidelines which will be outlined in your HCM Withdrawal Policy Statement™. If the markets deliver better than expected returns, spending can be increased. If the markets deliver less than expected returns, spending may need to be adjusted to maintain your success rates.
This process of ongoing evaluation and course-correction gives them the best chance to achieve lifetime financial independence.