The Importance of a Trusted Financial Advisor for Retirement
Understand Your Source of Information
At the most basic level, financial services sales require a couple of things:
Annuity
An annuity comes in many forms, but a simple definition is that an annuity is a contract that converts a sum of money into a series of periodic payments for an agreed upon period of time. An annuity can be thought of as a financial vehicle that converts a pool of money into a stream of income. Annuities are most useful in addressing the financial planning needs of people in or approaching retirement. Annuities are unique in the financial world because they can provide protection against the risk or outliving one’s assets (longevity risk) by guaranteeing income payments in perpetuity or any other selected amount of time. Annuities can be viewed as a type of personal pension plan. Social Security is similar to an annuity in that money contributed over the course of one’s working years is converted into a series of periodic payments that provide income during retirement.
Retirement Calculators and Planning Software
There are some outstanding financial planning tools and some very poor, misleading tools.
Your financial future is a bit like your health—it is complex and multi-faceted. As in healthcare, the tools used for financial diagnosis and the practitioner who interprets the results need to be up to the task.
Glossary:
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How Retirement Annuities Might Fit Into the Plan
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Key Financial Planning Concepts
The following are a few key concepts to think about, look for, or listen to when developing a financial plan:
Information Gathering: This is one of the first steps in the financial planning process. Your financial advisor should gather quite a bit of information about you and your current financial status.
Glossary:
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Financial Plans that Focus on Retirement Spending
The point of this section is not to provide you with a financial plan, but rather to discuss some important concepts that should be helpful when you do create a plan.
Glossary:
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Key Phrases:
Glossary:
