Getting Started
The Initial Consultation:
To begin, it is best to meet and have an open ended discussion. It is helpful for us to learn as much as we can about your preferences and expectations, as well as past disappointments and challenges. It is helpful to have a basic understanding of your income and tax picture, your assets and liabilities as well as your investments and insurance. Once we have a good understanding of where you are today and where you’d like to be in the future, we can quickly determine the type of work we can do for you and the benefits we can provide. This is also a good time for you to get to know us, so that you can be sure that we are a good fit for you as well.
The initial consultation is typically a 1 hour period of time, at no cost to you.
To set up an initial consultation, please contact us at 204-956-0519 or contact us online. When setting up your consultation, it is helpful if you are able to provide:
- Your name, phone number and e-mail address, so that we may contact you in the event of a scheduling change.
- Your stage in life and your primary questions or concerns.
A More Detailed Analysis:
- If a more detailed analysis is required or desired, we will let you know up front the estimated number of hours it will take to provide this analysis.
- This analysis would typically include a more thorough review of i) your income and expenses, ii) assets and liabilities and iii) reviewing the last two years of tax returns and then determining what you want each of these areas to look like in the future. When we know where we are today and how you want things to ideally look like in the future, then we can determine the most ideal way to get there. This approach helps to determine the amount of money that needs to be saved as well as the ideal location for it to be saved. In other words, it matters more “where you save” than “how much you save”.
- Once we see how all of these pieces fit together, we can then be more precise as to how to construct the most appropriate, custom portfolio for you.
Tax-Efficient Retirement Income Planning:
- When planning for retirement we have three typical objectives: i) to create a secure and consistent income in retirement, ii) to minimize the impact of taxes and iii) to create a low risk portfolio with high probability outcomes.
- To achieve these three objectives we use an “income first” methodology. This means that we will construct multiple income scenarios for you in advance so that we can all see the pros and cons of different combinations of retirement income today, and in the future. We recognize that throughout your retirement you may have as many as 15 to 25 different sources of income. We want to control the timing of each source of income, the flow of each source as well as the taxation of each source. This is what we refer to as the income layering process. Once we have determined the ideal income layering approach, we can then construct the ideal portfolio to deliver this income.
- To complete this analysis for you, we will begin by analyzing i) income and expenses, ii) assets and liabilities, iii) the last two years of tax returns, iv) your CPP statements as well as v) your various investment and pension statements.
Once the formal financial plan is complete, we would typically have much greater clarity as to how your investment portfolio should be managed or the degree to which you should update or modify your current insurance program. Time and attention may then begin to shift away from the financial plan and toward implementation of a revised tax strategy, investment portfolio 1 and updated Will and / or modifications to your current insurance program 2.
In other words, your questions would be answered and your plans would begin to take shape.