What is Stress Free Retirement Planning?
By having a Stress Free Retirement you should live longer and healthier not having to worry about your finances; running out of money, income keeping up with inflation, having funds available to Long Term Care Costs, protecting your assets against creditors, predators and probate. There is no one perfect financial instrument or solution, however there is proper planning and implementation that should include your spouse and maybe your children. Your stock broker, CPA, Attorney, Financial Planner can’t do everything for you and many times they are not equipped to provide the best “Retirement Planning” advice or service, many have agendas that put themselves and their firms before you and your families best interest. This in fact is so complicated that the Department of Labor has been trying to put into law ways to compel financial advisors to be fiduciary’s and put the best interest needs for retiree before their own. The Department of Labor has been trying this since 2015 and has failed!
I work as a consumer advocate and do what is best for my clients many of the recommendations I provide are not a service or product that I offer. 
First, I look to educate the consumer on the risks of retirement and actually give them a book called; Stress-Free Retirement by two time bestselling author Patrick Kelly. The books are also available on Amazon and Patrick Kelly’s website. I do not sell them, I give them to people I meet with in person for free with absolutely no obligation.
Questions to answer for a Stress-Free Retirement
Most people can’t answer these questions because they don’t want to think about them and don’t know where to get the solutions to the problems.
You can be like Congress and do nothing, just continue to kick the can down the road and hope for the best or you can put together a plan to help take the Stress out of your Retirement. You have options to avoid market risk without giving up the opportunity for market gains, there is a safe way to grow and protect your savings. Most people do not realize how much risk they are taking with their retirement savings or understand how to spend down their retirement savings in a safe way to avoid running out of money. Wall Street, Mutual Fund Companies, Stock Brokerage Firms are tied together with the media to promote that you should take all the risk with your investments and pay them a fee to manage them. How did this work in 2000-2002 or in 2008? Could something worse be coming down the road? Every 10 years or so we have an event that is so drastic; “that it never happened before”, but you need to take the risk and pay fees to have someone manage your money, or do you?
By reading the book; Stress-Free Retirement you will gain insight to a better way for your retirement savings and the book also talks about what happened with the Japanese Stock Market from 1989 to 2011 where they lost almost 80% of their value, Japan was the second largest economy in the world at the time. Check out the graph below.
From Yahoo Finance March 2018, Nikkei 225 and the S&P 500
During the mid to late 1980’s the Japanese market had enormous gains and then had enormous losses, the rapid increase is similar to the U.S. Markets of the last 4 years. Five stocks (FAANG) are responsible for much of the gains the last 4 years; Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix and Google, the U.S. Markets are top heavy meaning a few stocks at the top are weighted heavier than the other stocks in the index. Check out Yahoo Finance to find out more and you can also look up your holdings as well to see how they performed during 2000-2002 and in 2008.
Be sure to check out the Sequence of Return page on this sight to learn about the unique risk retirees face while spending down their retirement savings.
*Kenneth Olshein is in no way affiliated with Patrick Kelly or his book Stress Free Retirement, it is a book made available to some prospective clients on a limited basis*