HAVE YOU STRESS TESTED YOUR RETIREMENT PLAN?

A lot can happen between now and retirement.

A lot can happen in retirement.

Do you know exactly how your retirement lifestyle will be affected if: interest rates skyrocket, interest rates plummet, you are off work for a few months, you keep your income property, you sell your income property?

Are you confident that you are still on track to achieve your desired retirement lifestyle?

How would you know?

For many of us, we tend to take a “set it and forget it” approach to retirement planning. You might have set up a plan with your bank advisor years ago and continued to diligently contribute over the years. When your income went up, (hopefully!) you contributed more.

But when was the last time you stress tested this plan?

Have you seen recent projections that detail exactly what your lifestyle will look like if you continue contributing as you have been?

Think about it like this: even athletes who won a gold medal at the last Olympics must go through a rigorous qualification process to compete at the next Games.

Why?

Because a lot can happen between one Olympics and the next.

The training program that worked before the last Games may not work as well as the athlete ages. The athlete might have sustained an injury. There might be another athlete in the field now who poses a significant threat.

Winning a medal at one Olympics does not guarantee a medal win at the next!

So every four years, the athletes are tested again. They must prove that they still have what it takes to compete at the highest level.

Your retirement plan should get the same treatment.

Just because the projections looked great when you began contributing to your plan, does not mean you are still on track.

A financial planner can effectively stress test your plan: analyze current and retirement cashflow, project responses to a multitude of scenarios, and consider all angles of multiple income sources (pension, CPP/OAS, RRSPs, TFSAs, non-registered investments, rental properties, etc).

If these tests and projections show a shortfall, you can figure out how to contribute more (and to what vehicles) to reach your goals, or what retirement would look like if you did not contribute more.

Pulse Wealth Management offers retirement consults to put your plan through its paces.

If you want to be confident that your existing retirement plan can carry you all the way to the podium, book a retirement consult.