A Recipe for a Successful Retirement

Everyone has their favorite “go-to” award winning recipe: Grandma’s homemade soft chocolate chip cookies, Nana’s creamy butterscotch pie or great aunt Gigi’s savory chicken n dumplins. I personally could go on and on about my favorites. As luck would have it, whenever I attempt to make one of these dishes, I always seem to be missing an ingredient. I try to mimic the best I can with what I have in the pantry, but it never comes out tasting as delicious as it would if I had just taken the time to go to the grocery store and purchase the necessary ingredients. The reality is that if you want to create the delicious dishes like the ones I have previously mentioned, you must follow the directions accordingly. ‘Winging it’ and hoping for the best is a recipe for disaster! 

You may be surprised to find out that enjoying a successful retirement is a lot like having a blue-ribbon winning recipe at the state fair. If you have prepared, planned and taken inventory of those ingredients, while following the directions, the result can be everything you imagined and more!  You can’t ‘wing it’ when it comes to retirement and expect it to be a success.  To enjoy a successful retirement, you need all the ingredients, in the right amounts and in the correct order.  

First, start with your goal.  What’s your retirement flavor?  Are you wanting to retire in the snowy mountains of Colorado or on the white sandy beaches of Florida? Are you wanting to travel the world or stay close to home and spend more time with family and friends?   

Once you know what you want your retirement to look like, the next step is to develop the financial plan to get your there, the recipe for success.  There are many questions that you will need to answer.  How much income do I need during my retirement to cover all my needs?  How much money should I be putting into savings and my 401k? How quickly should I be paying off my debts and in what order?   

It’s important to remember that the plan is just the starting point.  Life is seldom a straight path and change is inevitable.  So, it’s important to make sure your plan also changes to stay aligned with your retirement goals. 

Like a complex recipe, planning for retirement can have a lot of ingredients with a lot of instructions. Each of us will have to decidae; do we want to learn the culinary arts, or do we want to have a chef prep our favorite dish?  That’s what American Trust is here to do.  You work hard to get to retirement and our belief is that you should get the most out of it.  With a firm certified for fiduciary excellence, a team of certified financial planners, accredited investment fiduciaries and chartered financial analysts, we have the ingredients needed to help you achieve your goals.  Where a chef strives to provide a dish that makes your taste buds sing, we as fiduciaries strive to build successful financial futures to help clients reach all their retirement goals.

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