INVESTMENT PLANNING
Every financial plan has a section on investment planning. The goal here is not to make specific investment recommendations of different products, because that is done through an investment advisor and not a financial planner.
Investment Recommendation Services
Nevertheless, in order to do a retirement plan to see how long your money will last, and how much after-tax income you can possibly receive, we need to determine a projected rate of return for your plan. This can only be done once you understand the pros and cons of the different types of investments including; cash, bonds, stocks and real estate. We also need to review your investment experience as well as your risk tolerance to determine your proper asset allocation. Only then can we determine reasonable investment projections/returns to use in your retirement planning.
As an example, someone who will only invest in bank accounts will pay more tax and usually have much lower returns then someone who is willing to diversify like a pension plan would. For this reason, we need to understand how you will be investing before doing a retirement plan, since the more conservative investor who is investing only in bank accounts, will have a much lower projected return and therefore their plan will require them to save a lot more money to reach their goals.
