FEELING COMFORTABLE ABOUT RETIREMENT
Ariel Racine could feel the anxiety welling up inside her. It was that ‘uh-oh!’ moment many people feel when retirement is just around the corner.
To put it bluntly, Racine felt completely unprepared.
“When you start looking at retirement, and you have no idea whether you’re ready, it’s a real cause for concern,” says Racine, 51, who works in sales. “I started to panic a little bit.” For a long time, Racine had other priorities: the mortgage, raising children and simply paying the bills.
But suddenly she was deciphering her retirement code: how much will she have saved; are her investments set up properly; and just how do they build retirement income?
These were just a few of the many pieces of the retirement puzzle Racine found herself grappling with.
But today she isn’t fretting over the details. She feels confident about her future. So what’s her secret? She got help. “When you meet with the right people and get the right informa- tion, and learn and educate yourself, it’s really not so big, bad and scary,” Racine says.
A longtime member of Servus Credit Union, Racine decided to take the simple step of meeting with an adviser to help her plan her retirement.
That’s how she met Kevin Skinner, a financial adviser with Servus-Wealth Strategies. Like all members he meets, Skinner first wanted to understand what makes Racine tick.
“It’s really about taking a holistic approach,” he says.
“When you’re looking at retirement planning, it’s not just looking at what someone has right now, it involves understanding where they’re trying to go and then figuring out how best to get them there.”
Retiring the right way generally doesn’t happen without a good road map to get you there, he adds. That’s where a financial professional can help build a plan that involves more than addressing whether you saved enough money.
“It’s about finding tax efficiencies and other issues youmay not have thought about, such as leaving a legacy and taking care of loved ones when you’re gone,” Skinner says.
At the top of the list for many clients is finding the right mix of investments to fund retirement. Thatwas something Racine found particularly challenging without assistance.
“Thereare just so many opinions and choices out there.”
And too many options with not enough knowledge often lead to too little action.
That didn’t happen to Racine, though, because she had Skinner helping her strike a balance in her portfolio between risk and reward to address her short-, medium- and long-term saving needs.
Retirement can be a long road requiring a diverse portfolio, Skinner says.
“If you’re 65 and we’re trying to make your money last until age 90, you will have money you need in the next five years, which needs to be conservatively invested,” he says.
“Then there’s money for the next six to 10 years, and you can take a little more risk with that, but there’s still a pool of money that you won’t need for 10-plus years.”
Individuals comfortable with the stockmarket can invest their longterm money in assets whose prices might goup and down dramatically, but overtime are more likely to pro- videahigher return than less-risky assets such as GICs.
“A retiree can take a little more risk with this money to make sure it’s going to grow faster than inflation for many years.”
Advisers can also help moderate the ‘greed’ and ‘fear’ factors that often afflict investors and can cause them to shipwreck retirement.
When markets are going like gang-busters, an adviser helps clients take profits and re-allocate them to more conservative investments. When markets are falling, an adviser can help investors overcome the urge to sell when prices are low.
More than anything, an adviser helps individuals make retirement decisions that are right for them.
“My adviser is certainly my retirement planning guide,” Racine says. “It’s always nice when you can lean on someone who has experience.”