Financial Planning for Retirees

Support your desired lifestyle for years to come

How can financial planning help me?

Are you nearing retirement age? Do you have everything in place to ensure that your retirement income will support your desired lifestyle for years to come?

If you’re in the last decade of your working life, now is the time to structure your retirement plan in a way that maximizes your income, minimizes the amount of tax that you’ll pay and secures your nest egg against market volatility that could significantly impact your lifestyle in retirement.

If you’re past or passing retirement age, you’ve got important milestones coming up, including the conversion of your RRSP savings into a Registered Retirement Income Fund (RRIF), also called a life annuity.

You’ve Worked Hard – Now, Let’s Protect Your Nest Egg

Is your investment portfolio designed to protect your nest egg as you approach retirement age? As you advance in age, sound investment strategy indicates that you should look to progressively decrease risk in your investment portfolio. There are three key reasons why:

 

  1. You've got less time to recover: If you suffer significant investment losses in your early sixties, you may end up retiring before the market fully recovers. Some investors lost 30-50% of their net worth or more in the 2008 housing collapse and financial crisis, and those who were nearing the ends of their careers and working lives were forced to retire with significantly less money than they planned.


  2. You've got more to lose: The longer you work, and the longer you save up, the more money you should have invested as you get nearer to retirement. That big nest egg means you can earn a lot of interest or investment income, but it also means that you’ve got more to lose in case the markets take a downturn.


  3. You've got a lot at stake: Experiencing negative returns in the years leading up to your retirement, or in the early years of retirement, can obliterate your plans to enjoy retirement on your terms.
     

At ATA Financial Group, we use financial planning to help you execute on sound investment principles that protect your wealth. We can review your current investments and asset mix, assess your risk exposure and help ensure that your nest egg is protected from market volatility that could affect your quality of life in retirement.

Leave More Behind for Your Loved Ones

The final component of effective financial planning for retirees is estate and succession planning. You’ve worked and earned all your life, and your estate will be the material legacy that you leave behind for families and loved ones. With careful preparation, your estate can deliver major benefits to your family via inheritance and have a lasting impact after you’re gone.

At ATA Financial Group, we frequently refer to the three-bucket approach to estate planning. When you die, everything that you own will either go to your beneficiaries, to charity or to taxes. Which buckets would you like to see filled?

For most of our clients, the principle desire is to help their beneficiaries and selected charities by minimizing taxes and passing on as much wealth as possible to the chosen recipients. We combine our in-depth knowledge of financial instruments and the Canadian tax code to help you pass as much wealth as possible to the next generation.

Comprehensive Retirement Planning That Works

Canadians today are living longer than ever before, thanks to improvements in health care and general quality of life. That’s great news, but it can also correlate with a phenomenon known as “Longevity Risk” that can impact your plans for retirement.

Here's how longevity risk works in a nutshell:

You start by determining how much income you’ll need in retirement to live the lifestyle that you want. Once you come up with a number, you calculate that you’ll be able to withdraw that amount from your retirement savings annually for 20 years with virtually zero risk of going broke. Knowing this, you retire at 65 and start living your dream retirement lifestyle.

That’s an ideal situation – but what happens if you live past 20 years? What if you live to be 90 or 95? Will your retirement savings last that long? What will happen if you run out of money? Will you have someone that can take care of you and other resources to draw on, or will you be financially ruined and too old to earn more money?

With Canadians living longer than ever before, longevity risk is becoming an increasingly important factor in effective retirement planning. When we create financial plans for retirees, we design retirement investment and withdrawal strategies that minimize longevity risk with measures that help your retirement savings last for as long as possible with a low likelihood of negative returns.

Our Process

We use the most current financial planning and management techniques to help you optimize your investments and cash flow as you get closer to retirement:
 

1
From our perspective, understanding the financial, emotional and relational aspects of your family situation are all equally important to creating your financial plan. We work to understand your goals and priorities first before we make any recommendations.

2
We review your existing financial situation, including retirement accounts, investments, portfolio analysis, estate plan analysis and more. We look for gaps in your planning and areas where we can improve your results.
 

3
We create and execute a custom-tailored financial plan that helps shield your investments from risk, increase your retirement income, lower your tax burden and maximize the impact of your estate.

Ready to secure your financial future?

At ATA Financial Group, we take pride in our personalized approach to financial planning. Each individual, family or institution has unique goals for their financial future. We work to identify those goals and develop a comprehensive, custom-tailored financial plan that helps you achieve them.

Call us today for a free consultation and let’s take the first step toward achieving your financial goals and dreams.