Lytle Rather on Retirement

When I think about helping our clients, we have found that a lot of people who come to us are in the midst of, or close to a transition, whether it be retirement, spouse passing away, or changing careers. As I think back about a specific instance, a client was referred to us. He was getting ready to retire.

He had his money invested in such a way that he thought was too aggressive, and so he went back to the people that he was working with and said, I just feel like I’m too aggressive. You know, I’m getting ready to go through this transition of retirement. They lowered his risk by really just a guess. I mean, they lowered it from being this risky to this risky, and my question was, well, what if you could do all you wanted to do and only take this much risk? So he came into the office, and we asked a lot of questions, and we really found out what he wanted to do. We understood what he wanted his money to accomplish, and in doing so, we were able to design a plan that took the appropriate amount of risk for him to be able to do that.

And it turned out the plan that we built took his risk from here to here. This was in late 2007, and as we all remember, in 2008 and 2009, the stock market went down 57%. He had a lot less money exposed to the market, not because we were trying to guess the market or because we thought it was going down. What we did was plan in advance of that. And when it happened, he was able to stick with that plan. He was able to stay retired, he was still able to travel, he was still able to do all those things that he wanted to do because we had intentionally built the plan the way that we built it.