The retirement income shift

Recently, I began working with a client who should have been living his best life. He had entered retirement just ten years earlier with a $1.2 million portfolio, a large family home, a luxury vacation home, and plans to someday leave his children a large estate. He and his wife enjoyed travel, treating family members to memorable vacations, participating in meaningful hobbies, supporting charities important to them, and hosting the best parties in town. This was the life he had worked, saved, and invested for decades to achieve. Yet as we looked at his current situation, he was in tears. That $1.2 million portfolio was down to $470,000. There was a very real possibility that if he didn't make some major changes, he would run out of money within a few years.

I'm sure you don't want this to happen to you. Instead, your retirement years become your "golden" years, when you have the money that you need to last the rest of your life. Throughout this book, you will learn how to use a conservative yet dynamic strategy to align your investments to reach your goals. By using the wisdom of math and logic, you can help assure yourself a comfortable retirement that lasts as long as you do.

By the end of this book, you will have:

• An understanding of how to use the Income + Growth = Total Return equation to make your investments last a lifetime.
• Learned how to use math and logic to determine the best investments for your specific needs.
• Learned why commonly accepted investment maxims shouldn't be so commonly accepted.
• And been provided with specific strategies to make sure you have enough income in retirement to live the life you want to live.

You are going to hear countless ways to create income while you're building your portfolio; unfortunately, there are only two ways that you will get income from your portfolio once you retire. The first way, and the most common, is engineering income by taking withdrawals from your assets. If you think about it, you can call each withdrawal a set amount of income for you to spend as needed. You can set these withdrawals on autopilot to be paid to you monthly. The question is: Where is the income coming from? I wrote this book to provide options for you to consider as you build, and then withdraw from, your financial portfolio.