Ask Team Jackie Porter Series – Financial Planning with Jin Lee

Jackie is joined by her right-hand teammate/office husband this week to give you guys a glimpse of what the financial planning process looks like when you hire a financial planner. We started this series – Ask Team Jackie – to give our community members an opportunity to ask the team anything about financial planning and to help you with managing your finances. You can send in your questions via email at info@askjackie.ca. We are also offering a free 30 mins strategy session to our community members.

This week we are delving into a typical scenario to give you a bird’s eye view of what to expect when we work with clients on their financial plans.

Walking you through the financial process of a recent clients who is getting closer to retirement and wondering what her financial future would look like

Every financial planning client is unique and requires a special strategy. We have noticed that clients who are getting close to retirement often struggle with deciding when to finally retire and getting a sense of what will happen next. In Jackie’s words, how do you decide when to pull the trigger for retirement, what could be stopping you from retiring? According to Jin, the deliberation often comes from a place of doubt and fear. People tend to be worried about how they will survive without their paycheck or how they can keep up with mortgage payments if they are retiring with a mortgage.

A mindset shift that starts with getting used to the idea of living off the income earned from your job to taking the income from investments can be huge step for many clients to take. Mainly because we are not used to the idea of living off the money we have accumulated. Even though the funds were earmarked for this purpose, the exercise of living off your savings requires an adjustment period for many of our clients.

Is it possible to Retire? What will that look like?

A lot of our clients come in not knowing they can retire but we are able to create a plan to show them how that can be possible. Yes, sometimes we get clients who still push back because they are not sure how they will fill the time they previously dedicated to working. One important step we recommend is starting with a reduction in work hours. For example, moving from full-time to part-time and the same goes for business owners or entrepreneurs.

Planning – assuming worse case scenarios

Another thing we do is, help clients think of all kinds of worst-case scenarios and walk them through how to survive these scenarios should they become reality. This can include planning with a lower interest rate on their investments and higher inflation rate. This also looks like showing them living longer normally assuming a plan to age 95. After this process, we find that clients tend to get more confident and comfortable with retiring and trusting us to help plan their finances long-term.

Factoring in Long term care costs in retirement

This client was worried about their medical costs and long-term care costs. They’re asking us if they can afford quality care when they are no longer part of the insurance their job offers. What we do is we deliver extensive research on all kinds of care packages and what the future of government funding for seniors looks like, and again think of how this can impact our client’s future. Based on our research, the current rate for private rooms at long-term care nursing homes is $90 per day to be paid by the patients, while the government will on average pay about $200 per day on top of that $90 for long-term care costs. So, a worst-case scenario will be that the government cannot afford to pay and our client has to pay the full amount.

We basically stress test what their future could potentially look like despite the changing government and economic policies. We also dive into all the intricacies and gray areas that can easily be missed if they don’t consult a financial planner.

There’s a lot more that goes into the financial process and we will be happy to answer any more questions you have about what we do at Team Jackie Porter. If you are looking for tips on how to retire, stress testing, what long-term care costs look like, and all the things you need factor into your retirement plan, reach out to us for a free one-on-one session at info@askjackie.ca or at Jody.euloth@askjackie.ca