Today’s Retirement Crisis
During our more than 2 decades assisting hundreds of families with their retirement plans, we have discovered a significant retirement crisis ravaging family wealth, nationwide.
Feeding into this uncertain economic landscape are 3 avoidable culprits.
These are:
- Inattention from advisors
- Incomplete conversations
- Inaccurate information
The Four Pillars of Retirement™
Morgan Hill and the Hill & Hill team have designed a proprietary financial planning process called The Four Pillars of Retirement™.
Within Morgan’s popular book, Building a Better Retirement, our coordinated process simplifies and integrates all the most important areas of your finances, including Investing and Income, Risk Management, Estate Planning, and Taxes
Pillar #1: Investing and Income
Make sure you never run out of income.
When you are concerned about creating consistent income in retirement, wild market volatility can quickly derail your plans and income needs, especially over the span of a 20-to-30-year retirement. Without proper planning, this can lead to one of the greatest fears facing today’s retirees—outliving your money. Our most essential responsibility to you as the first fundamental pillar of retirement, is to create a reliable and consistent stream of income throughout retirement.
We help you accomplish this by:
- Creating an Income Plan - A written income plan that tells you where your income is coming from, and when you will begin to access it, provides you with a realistic expectation and secure roadmap to sustain you through multiple decades of retirement.
- Maximizing Social Security - As the largest stream of income for most retirees, choosing a strategy that maximizes your benefits can make a tremendous difference to support your retirement income goals.
- Ensuring Stability of Your Investment Income - Our Complete Portfolio Investment Strategy allocates and diversifies your savings into three different spheres of investments to balance growth, liquidity and asset preservation.
Pillar #2: Risk Management
Avoid investments that could put your hard-earned money at risk.
As we begin putting your retirement house in order, we will consider your risk tolerance level, and make data-based recommendations against investments that may not be worth taking. Especially those that could be catastrophic to the longevity of your life savings.
Examples include:
- Losing money due to dramatic downturns in the stock market that could lessen the amount of income or number of retirement years your savings can support.
- Losing a pension when a spouse unexpectedly passes away that could mean a dramatic change in quality of life without a backup plan.
- Losing your life savings to a significant healthcare event for one or both spouses that could burn-through resources, particularly for supporting the healthy spouse later on.
Losing your retirement savings by living longer than expected compounded by the need for hired caregivers for activities of daily living.
Each of these areas can threaten to deplete your savings prematurely if not addressed in your financial plan. Within the second pillar to retirement planning, we provide a 10-point assessment to help evaluate your longevity risk and then deliver a proactive plan with coverage options to help manage future risk.
Pillar #3: Estate Planning
Be sure those you love inherit your assets!
We have discovered that very few people actually have a clearly defined estate plan for disposition of their assets and personal belongings. Many people either haven’t found the time to put a plan together or are just confused about where to begin.
It is important to recognize that different assets convey to different people in different ways. Because of this, we treat estate planning as the third pillar of retirement, and we provide the education you need to feel confident in choosing a plan that maximizes the value of your assets and preserves them for your intended recipients.
To do this, we have created The Balanced Estate Planning Model© to help identify the 3 primary types of property that you can own and the 3 best ways these assets can transfer when you pass away. By completing this exercise together, we can help ensure your estate passes to the right folks, at the right time, in the right way.
Pillar #4: Taxes
Don’t pay more in taxes than is absolutely required.
The fourth and final pillar of retirement planning is taxes because it's not just about what you make, but what you keep! Given the overwhelming national debt that continues to grow with interest, it is hard to deny that there is a very real possibility of tax increases during the next 2 to 3 decades and during your retirement. This, along with confusion surrounding the IRS tax code, taxes have become a maze of complexity that can be challenging to navigate.
Hill & Hill can help you utilize legitimate tax strategies to future-proof more of your hard-earned money. To get your retirement house in order, you need advanced tax planning tactics normally used by businesses and non-profits that may not be widely understood or utilized by the general public.
