PART 2 OF 3: How To Build Up Your Money Status To Create The Retirement Of Your Dreams

Hi! I'm Jason Bergquist, the owner and founder of RetirementOfYourDreams.com.

Today, I want to share with you ….

Part 2 of 3: How To Build Up Your Money Status To Create The Retirement Of Your Dreams.

Click here if you haven’t seen Part 1 yet.

Specifically, this video is for you if you need clarification and guidance when it comes to understanding your current financial situation.

I want to start today and empower you to secure your financial stability and independence in retirement with these 3 valuable keys:

1. Unlocking The Retirement Of Your Dreams: Understanding Your Needs, Goals, and Dreams 

2. Investment Clarity: Understanding Your Current Investments To Realize The Retirement Of Your Dreams 

3. The Secret to a Secure Retirement: Guaranteed Future Income Sources

Let me introduce myself if we still need to meet. I'm Jason Bergquist!

I joined this business to help people create the Retirement Of Their dreams.

I've been doing this for over 20 years through the ups and downs of the markets.

My whole goal is to help educate people. Help them understand how to set up the retirement of their dreams and bring hope back into their lives.

I realized this was my calling in 2010 when I was going through a divorce. At that time, I was financially low, and I realized that I wasn't practicing what I preached.

So, I committed to practicing what I preached and became an Independent Financial Professional and a Certified Financial Fiduciary.

Now, I have a team of experts helping me figure out all of the best options that are out there to empower you to create the Retirement Of Your Dreams.

Again, I’m going to cover Part 2 Of 3: How To Build Up Your Money Status To Create The Retirement Of Your Dreams, including:

1. Unlocking The Retirement Of Your Dreams: Understanding Your Needs, Goals, and Dreams

2. Investment Clarity: Understanding Your Current Investments To Realize The Retirement Of Your Dreams

3. The Secret to a Secure Retirement: Guaranteed Future Income Sources

Let’s start with …

So, there are two aspects to this.

Why and How.

Why:

Why do we need to discuss needs and goals as we figure out the details of your retirement?

Why do we want to figure out our Goals for the future?

What do they want in Retirement?

What does Retirement look like to them?

Most of the time, I get a blank stare, or I’m not sure, I haven’t given it much thought.

So, we start with this:

… when guaranteed sources of income come in every month to cover the monthly expenses going out!

What better way to live a Stress-Free Retirement than to not worry about your bills, right!?

Many people say they live on a fixed income. That's a phrase that we often use in retirement.

If you live on a fixed income …

… AND IF you get income that's coming in from a “guaranteed source that's set for the rest of your life,” …

… it’s covering your basic needs, then the stress of not having to work or make money is gone!

So, the first question that we always work through is, what are your needs?

How much do you ‘need’ to come in every month to ensure your bills are covered, and you don't have to go to work?

Then when we have that established and know what that is …

… we want to discuss your goals, dreams, and what you want to do …

… So, I start down that line of questions:

Again, what do your Retirement years look like …

… Again, a lot of blank stares.

It doesn’t always mean for everyone that they don’t make any money or do not do any work.

Some people’s idea of retirement is working part-time, but maybe now they have figured out a way to earn money doing something they love …

… with a hobby or something, they can do part-time/spare time and still bring in some extra Cash.

Some tell me they literally don’t want to ‘have’ to work another day in their life.

That’s fine too ...

... But I want to go deeper, so we start to talk further, like ...

… what’s on your bucket list! Travel/Vacation/Spend time with Family ...

... even deeper …

… where do you want to travel to?

What places are on your bucket list?

And usually, when I’m talking to a couple, the husband says, “Ask her. Wherever she wants to go is where we will go! LOL!”

Do you want to sell your home, buy an RV, and travel wherever you can drive or park it outside your kid’s houses and spend as much time with each of them as you want?

For example, I was working through this with one of my clients.

It was a funny experience where the husband said, “I want to have enough extra money to go to any movie I want to go to at any time. I don't have to care how much the movie costs.”

“I can see it in any format I want. I can buy my popcorn, drinks, and food, and it doesn't matter that it just costs me $75 to go to the movies by myself and watch a show because I picked Prime everything.”

And his wife looked at him and said, “I had no idea that's something you ever wanted to do or cared to do.”

We had a good laugh about it!

We flipped his goal, and I said, “What if you could own a movie theater so you could make a revenue off of your goal of seeing every movie and it not costing you anything?”

That was a funny time walking them through this process!

Back to Pam, when we went through this process with Pam, she wanted to be able to travel.

Now, she was retiring before her husband, so she had all sorts of trips planned with her sisters and girlfriends.

We'll get to her in a minute.

Those things shifted as she got into retirement.

But if we know your goals, we can determine that discretionary income allotment we all want to have in excesses in retirement to do the fun things we have always dreamed of as well.

What do I mean by a Just In Case Retirement? I’m glad you asked 🙂

It’s where you don’t spend your hard-earned saved monies just in case you have ... something comes up in the future you have to pay for Just in case there is a medical need and so on.

So, you Don’t Live the Retirement of your Dreams out of a scarcity mindset (like we discussed in previous steps).

To not live the Just In Case Retirement, we need plans for these scenarios (All of which will be discussed in other Steps & videos).

You decide not to Join the Country Club, Buy a Boat, or See the world “just in case …”

… then you pass away and leave the money you didn’t spend, and what does your family do with the money?

Join the Country Club, Buy a Boat, See the World! 🙂

Anyway, back to the point at hand...

What extra do you have coming in, so we know what you want to do …

… and, you know too!

Retirement is always exciting when we discuss going and doing what we want …

… Golf, travel, so on and so on.

We are literally going to plan for 3 Stages of Retirement:

She spent her early years with an active lifestyle, golfing, playing tennis, traveling, etc.

A more passive stage in which you decide to let the pace of your lives slow down.

If you don’t know what I mean … 

… Failing health makes medical treatment and nursing care the defining characteristics.
You need to figure out your expenses. You need to know what expenses you're going to have in retirement.

Think through the things you're currently spending money on and whether they will still be there in retirement.

I just had this conversation with Rick. We were talking.

And Rick said, “He had all of this planned out in his retirement.”

But we mentioned inflation and dealing with the cost of goods going up in the future.

The action step here “is delving deep!”

You have to take a close look at what your expenditure is.

So, if you're not currently using a budget …

… or what we like to call a spending plan …

… you need to dial that in and know what your costs will be in retirement so that you're not surprised by the lack of income coming in to cover your goals and dreams!

Let’s think through what you want in retirement together.

What do you want to do in retirement?

If you want to spend $10,000 a month on traveling, we need to know that goal. We want to consider your bucket list and what retirement looks like.

Okay, on to Step 2!

Next, you want to know what investments you have.

So, this is where we need to get down to the nitty-gritty.

We need to review all those files you've been just putting away and not looking at, go through what you currently have, get your logins, and understand how we access each.

On the assessment form, you’ll see we have areas for you to fill in the details.

Also, there are dropdowns to help you think of different investments that you haven't looked at in a while …

… you're not even sure what's in there or where they are anymore.

So, we want to start listing all of those out.

And you'll see on the form that as you start listing those out, for example, you'll see your 401k.

That's usually/typically people's number one retirement holding.

Once you pick 401k, it will ask what your current balance is, but it will also ask you what your annual contribution is.

And in addition to your contribution, we still want to know how your company's match works.

As we go through your investments and work through this process, we will get into some details to understand if you have things in the right place.

For example, as I met with a client yesterday, we were going through this process, and I asked a few questions.

She had filled out this form but needed to know the answer to some of my follow-up questions.

Like you, you may or may not know the answer, and that's fine. This is typically the scenario we see and where we help you work through the details.

… and hold your hand, help you think of those things you probably don't know the answers to, and we'll work through that process together.

So back to Pam.

When we went through this process with Pam, she could pull up a statement online.

She could tell us exactly what her balance was and what was coming from her monthly paycheck, but she needed to figure out the match.

She needed clarification when I asked, “Hey, do you have another version of your 401k?”
She asked, “What do you mean? What are you talking about?”

I replied, “If you work for certain entities, you may have a 401A or a 403B, and your company may offer you a Roth version of those accounts.”

In other words, we will work with you to go through these steps.

Each of these processes.

But dialing in each of these investments will inform us of what we’ll do next to create the Retirement Of Your Dreams!

Okay, now for Step 3.

Now we’ll figure out what amount of guaranteed income will come in monthly in each stage of your Retirement and find those Shortfalls.

Remember, at this stage, you’ll have some fixed income. It’s our job to help you secure that and increase it where needed so you don’t run into any Shortfalls or surprises during Retirement.

When you look at those guaranteed sources of income (or the lack thereof), we will go back to step two, look at your investments, and be able to make recommendations.

Let’s say you have your 401k in the market, an IRA, or whatever. Those investments are subject to downturns in the market.

Sure, you get the gains too, but now we are more interested in the safety of our monies, so we are not losing just before or after retirement.

We will discuss this in more depth in Step 7 when we detail the “Retirement Red Zone.”

We will go through all of your accounts to determine which ones give you a guaranteed source of income in the future or if we can move them to accounts that will...

But you'll see on the form that we have a whole section of retirement savings accounts called ‘guaranteed income sources.’

And what are the 3 listed: Social Security, Pensions, and Annuities?

Those are the only 3 that have the potential to give us a source of guaranteed lifetime income.

Again, some of them have their caveats. I know people's opinions on social security & pensions may or may not exist in your life, but this is the piece we will work on.

I know some will throw Real-estate into the mix and other investment options. We will go through them all in detail.

We will discuss each one.

Ensure the proper amount comes in every month, including covering inflation increases over our lifetime.

And make sure you always have the money you need per month to cover the bills!

So, you NEVER have to go back to work!

… The process of thinking that they have to go back to work later in life if they run out of money! 

That is a scary, daunting thought for most!

So, we are going to make sure you are covered!

As we work through the rest of those options …

… we talk about your discretionary funds and what you have for your play money, the ability to do what you want in retirement.

As we went through this process with Pam, I've told you a little about her story, and we will eventually finish the story …

… but she had one area she was worried about because she was 55 and retiring early.

Her biggest retirement asset was her 401k, a qualified account without getting too nitty gritty, meaning it has yet to be taxed.

If you take out those funds before you're 59 and a half, you have a 10% penalty above and beyond just paying taxes.

So, as we worked through this process with Pam, this was eye-opening for her.

She knew this; she had done some research before we met, but we told her there was a way to avoid that 10% penalty.

And this allowed her to retire right then and there at 55 because we leveraged a legal tax loophole and avoided that 10% penalty!

We put all her different funds into these buckets to give her a guaranteed income for the rest of her life.

No matter how long she planned to live, this income comes monthly.

And as we went through that process … Pam was in tears! …

… she just started bawling because she did not believe this was possible.

And we were able to help her figure that out. And that's not uncommon. There's a phrase that we always use!

We don't know what we don't know.

Before we went through this information, she thought she couldn’t retire until she was 59 and a half because she couldn’t afford to retire and NOT Replace that income immediately.

But Pam could retire if we could replace her income, and she didn't think she could replace a high enough percentage of her income if there were that additional 10% penalty.

And so, she would work until she was 59 and a half. So yeah, she did not know how to make it happen.

So, the client assessment was life-changing for Pam. What Joy it brought into her life, and how overjoyed we were to be a part of that process!

… visit Social Security online, @ ssa.gov. Create an account and get your social security payment breakdown.

The earliest you can take it: They give you the amount for Age 62

They give you your Full Retirement Age (FRA), the dollar amount per month at that point, and the amount at the max-age of 70.

You need that information so we can maximize your SSI Benefits and best utilize that source of guaranteed lifetime income.

If you have a pension from wherever you have worked, the same thing.

They work a lot like SS.

There should be a lump sum, and then the company should give you options for what that payout looks like.

And there are a couple of options for payouts, like age and Single Payout vs. Joint Payouts or a period-specific payout for a specific # of years.

Then, when we know the details of 2 possible sources of guaranteed lifetime income, we will see precisely what your guaranteed income is, and then we can add a third piece of the puzzle and fill in the Shortfalls.

Usually, social security and your pension payments make up about 40 to 60% of the retirement income you're looking for.

So, we have to add a third source, which we'll work on together.

1. Unlocking The Retirement Of Your Dreams: Understanding Your Needs, Goals, and Dreams

2. Investment Clarity: Understanding Your Current Investments To Realize The Retirement Of Your Dreams

3. The Secret to a Secure Retirement: Guaranteed Future Income Sources

So now that you understand how Money Status works …

Be ready for Part 3, which is coming out next week. That’ll cover the 3 most significant challenges to completing the Retirement Of Your Dreams™ Assessment.

Thank you for considering RetirementOfYourDreams.com as your partner on your financial journey!

I'm committed to empowering you to achieve the Retirement Of Your Dreams,

This is Jason Bergquist, and I look forward to meeting you!