You’ve probably envisioned a fun and financially secure future once you stop working.

After working hard for so long, it’s finally time to enjoy all the things you never had time to do while you were working.

Let’s be honest though; you’ve become addicted to a regular pay cheque and you definitely need that to continue throughout your life expectancy.

Successful retirement planning means that you have a process of saving and investing your money during your working years, to generate enough after- tax income to sustain you in retirement. It's about creating an income to maintain your desired lifestyle and cover essential expenses, when you're no longer earning a regular income.

A lot of people focus on building the largest net worth or the biggest account but that may not generate you the most after-tax income. Remember, you can’t eat your living room and some investments aren’t liquid or don’t provide income. That’s why it’s so important to plan early, to set your accounts up with the end in mind. Starting your retirement plan early will help you do this.

At Wealth Maximization Group, we do a detailed analysis to assess your current expenses and work with you to forecast your future expenses, while allowing for inflation. We always say “garbage in garbage out” so it’s critical to get the forecasted future retirement income as accurate as possible! Even so like a GPS this is just a projection and things will change along the journey.

Then we incorporate your risk profile to get a reasonable projected rate of return to complete a retirement feasibility assessment to determine the likelihood of you reaching your goals in various stock market scenarios.

Unlike with other plans, we then look at how the sequence of return issues can affect your income success and incorporate strategies to protect against as many obstacles as possible (example higher inflation and taxes, market volatility, unplanned expenses.

Remember that retirement planning is not a one-size-fits-all process. It should be tailored to your unique financial situation, goals, and timeline.