We met with our financial planner last week for the second time. If you are considering retirement, I highly recommend meeting with a financial/retirement planner. It is valuable to have a second opinion on your retirement plans and it goes a long way to providing “domestic tranquility”, i.e. your wilfe will no longer think she will be a “bag lady” after five years after retirement.

The first time we met with Joe (I’ll call him Joe), we discussed our expectation on retirement and discussed our “gozinta” and “gozoutta”, but not at length.

With the “internets”, it is so easy to compile your annual income and expenses on a spreadsheet accurately. After some tweaking and adjusting, I sent our income/expenses to “Joe”. Last week we met with him to go over our “exit plan”.

Joe had put together a presentation of our income and expenses projected into the future. The projection included life expectancy and ran until we “croaked”. The program Joe ran (a monte-carlo simulation) twiddles a significant number of economic future possiblities. This simulation then spits out a number that represents the probability that over your expected lifetime and given variable economic situations, you will not go broke.

Our plan is very likely to succeed. If you have not yet retired, I recommend you meet with a financial/retirement planner to validate your plans or to create a plan if you do not have one!

Not all retirement planners are created equal. Do your homework.

Oh and what’s in it for Joe?  He will be managing our IRA funds when we retire.  Joe will be tracking  our plan, both income and expenses, so we know when/if we are not on track.  I’ll keep track as well.