TruNorth offers various resources and services to help you determine the right plan for you to achieve your financial goals. Our retirement advisors are dedicated to helping you understand your current financial status and can help you create a plan to maximize your finances and ensure you’re on the right track for retirement.

Income Planning

As you plan for retirement, it’s wise to plan on having other sources of income streams because you will no longer be able to rely on your job for income. During this planning stage, your financial advisor can work with you to plan different strategies to start investing in other sources outside your current job income that can help grow your money over time. Investment sources like social security, fixed annuities, and pensions are a few examples of how you can use your money to invest in your future.

Investment Management

Investment management has everything to do with developing your financial plan, evaluating your goals, and discovering how comfortable you are with risk. Once you understand your plan and your needs, it’s important to stay on track and start working towards completing each milestone. You’ll start by looking at your finances and discovering where you have extra money and how to save that money to then invest in your retirement plan to have that money grow. Managing your finances means you have a road map to your future set, and you’re working towards making smart investment decisions, helping you achieve your retirement plans.

Legacy Planning

Legacy planning is all about transferring your assets to your loved ones or whomever you want your assets to go to after your death. Without a plan, transferring your assets can get legally messy. Without a planned-out beneficiary of your choice, the courts will assign an administrator to handle your finances and divvy out who gets what. This can then become a huge burden on your loved ones, and your assets may not be passed down to the people you want them to go to.

Risk Management

TruNorth can help you understand the risks when it comes to planning for retirement. Below are a few tips about what qualifies as risk and how you can plan for it.

• Through a third-party organization, a complete audit of insurance will be conducted. The third party can then work with us to discover how much risk you have with your investments like auto, home, and liabilities. What is risk? Risk is uncertainty about your investments that has the potential to impact your financial status in a negative way.
• Long-term care analysis. This analysis is a service provided to meet a person’s overall health and personal care needs for an extended period of time. Everyone ages, and with age, it gets harder and harder to perform daily activities. Planning for your long-term care is important to make sure you are taken care of as you get older.
• Life insurance benefits. This can replace your income for years of lost job salary and can also assist you in paying off your home mortgage and debt.
• Medicare needs. Medicare is federal health insurance that most people can qualify for at the age of 65 years old.

Tax Planning

Understanding how taxes works, in general, is a good way to invest your time, but it can be crucial when you’re setting up and beginning your retirement planning journey. If you aren’t careful, you could hurt a large part of your income and savings. Our financial advisors can help you understand how retirement tax works and determine tax-saving strategies that can lower the amount of taxes you pay. Here are a few examples:

• If your employer has a 401k option, contributing a set amount of money towards this can lower your income tax.
• A Roth IRA is an incredible resource that can save you money tax-free.
• Delay withdrawing from your 401k because you can be penalized for withdrawing early.
• Make catch-up contributions. Catch-up contributions are applicable to those who are starting their retirement plan later at the age of 50+.

The future is a long way away, and many people tend to think that they’ll have plenty of time to think about retirement later. What some don’t realize is that retirement creeps up on you, and if you haven’t taken the necessary actions to plan for retirement, you’ll start to scramble and can stress about not being prepared and financially secure to quit your job and retire. Social security is typically not enough to live off of, and you likely don’t want to work until you die. What’s going to cover your mortgage, food, clothes, and lifestyle you’ve developed over the years? Social security typically does not cover even half of those costs. 

When you are no longer earning an income and transition to living off what you’ve put aside for retirement, it is inevitable that you will experience a change in lifestyle and likely that you will not have as much disposable income. However, with adequate preparation, you can expect to enjoy your retirement in relative comfort and to have all of your needs met. 

There tend to be more unexpected expenses as we age as well. These often come in the form of medical expenses, increases in the cost of utilities, commodities, and housing, and growing extended families. Grandchildren are a blessing, but the price of visits and gifts can certainly add up! Social security and pensions can help but are generally not enough by themselves to allow you to live comfortably. The sooner you begin planning your finances for retirement, the more you typically can enjoy yourself when you are no longer working. It is never too soon to start thinking about how you want to live when you retire and to take steps toward making that vision a reality. Planning for the future now and starting your retirement journey can give you more peace of mind as you continue living your life.

Now! Typically the longer you wait, the less money you’ll make, and the sooner you start, the more money you’ll grow, securing a better future. Start now and meet with one of our financial specialists to create a custom retirement strategy for you.

Many benefits come with starting your retirement plan. Mentally you can be in a better place, knowing that your financial future is more secure. It can allow you to live a more frugal life and take those vacations you want to take because you know you’re already saving and your money is growing on its own. You can have a higher sense of freedom, and it can help you prepare for unexpected circumstances.

The first step toward financial security in your retirement years is scheduling a meeting with one of the expert advisors at TruNorth. Without professional guidance, the task of even knowing where to begin with financial planning for retirement can be extremely daunting. 

TruNorth Advisors serves clients in multiple locations, so whether you are looking for Greenville financial services, Clemson financial services, or any of our other locations, you will be in good hands when you contact our team of retirement and investment professionals. 

 During your meeting, we will discuss your options for growing, protecting, and distributing your wealth. Whichever stage of the financial planning for retirement you are in; growing your nest egg, managing your wealth while enjoying your retirement, or updating your estate plan to secure your legacy for your intended recipients, we are here to help you understand the retirement process and help you make choices that align with your financial goals.

Investing for retirement comes with its own special set of considerations. You’ll want to be able to access your funds when you need them while not allowing your money to simply stagnate. Your personalized financial plan might include the following: 

• IRA: IRA stands for Individual Retirement Account, and they are a staple of most people’s retirement portfolios. They help you to save and accumulate funds for use in retirement and have the additional benefit of being tax-exempt.

• Equities: More commonly known as stocks, equities are shares in a publicly traded company. They have the potential to help you grow your wealth steadily over time, but they are never risk-free. A professional financial advisor can help you choose more stable and reliable equities to minimize the chance of making an unwise investment.
• Bonds: These are financial instruments issued by the government that offer a steady return. The rate at which they accumulate interest is generally lower than your earnings might be with equities, but they have the advantage of being stable and reliably safe.

• Property: We can help you choose the best way for the properties you own to earn you money. That might include renting, moving into a smaller property, or one that is easier to maintain, or even selling. But don’t worry; we will never pressure you into making any choices about your properties that you and your family are not comfortable with. We are here to present you with the best options and guide you through the processes. 

Keep in mind that any cash you have at hand can be put to work for your retirement as well. Between the financial instruments listed above, property, cash, and more, we can help you create a robust plan for your retirement finances.

One of the things we often hear from our clients is that they were reluctant about investing their retirement money before meeting with us because they were uncertain about the risks. After their initial meeting with TruNorth, they nearly always came away more confident and well-informed, and were much better prepared to move forward in their retirement planning.

If you are like many of our clients, your wealth is important not only for your own well-being in retirement, but also for your spouse, children, or other dependents. You want to be able to provide a good life for yourself and for your loved ones after you pass away. Gifts, trusts, living wills, estate planning, charitable donations, and more are all important to plan out while making retirement arrangements. These considerations can often present complex and difficult issues for our clients and their families, and you can trust us to provide financial options with honesty, integrity, and sensitivity to your individual situation.