Business Brokers BC Blog

In the old days retirement used to be the day you turned 65, got a gold watch and headed home to a life of fishing, book reading and relaxing.

Today that view has changed and people now think of many healthy, active, productive years pursuing activities they love and making valuable contributions to society.  The truth is that if you really want to get the most out of retirement, you don’t really retire.  You simply shift gears and focus on different things. Also, at the end of the day, you must have a plan to deal with the challenges that life will present to you.  How will you deal with issues such as marriage, divorce, disability and death?  The problem for many people is not that events occur (they always will), but rather that they have failed to anticipate and prepare for them.  Events only become problems when they are not anticipated and planned for.  It is you and you alone who is accountable for ensuring that your plan does and what you want it to do.

Many of the common traps we see include:

• Not having any will or living trust.  Having an ill-prepared plan without competent advice.
• Titling too much property in joint tenancy.
• Failing to prepare and implement a business succession plan.
• Failing to plan for disability or critical illness.
• Emphasizing too much on taxation and financial returns without proper regard to asset protection and ensuring that your property will go to who you want, when you want and how you want.

How much money will I need?

For many people, the answer is to save as much as you can and hope that it is enough.

For others, they may have more than they could possible spend in ten lifetimes.  In all cases, however, the first and most important financial concern is ensuring that you and your spouse will have a guaranteed standard of living for as long as each of you shall live.  Therefore before you begin the process of planning the distribution or sharing of your wealth be absolutely certain that your lifestyle is guaranteed and that you and your spouse will be fully provided for to age 100.

The ideal is to create a flexible and dynamic plan while you are healthy and in control. However this is difficult to do alone you should seek out and retain competent advisors.  Tell them clearly what you want and listen to what they have to say.  Give this your full and complete attention, it is one of the most important decisions you will make.  Realize that there will likely be multiple aspects to your plan – legal, accounting, business sale, tax planning etc.  Do not make the mistake of thinking one advisor can completely handle all of this as in this day and age it is difficult to stay on top of one area let alone several.  However, remember at the end of the day you give the direction and leadership.  You hire and fire when required.  It is your plan you will be in charge but look to those people who are expert in their areas.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 16th, 2009 at 1:29 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.