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So a lot of people come to us that are really successful do-it-yourself investors, and while you may have done a great job of accumulating and saving for your own retirement, there is so much information out there and so much to know when it comes to the second phase of retirement planning, which is the income phase.

When you’re in your 30’s and even 40’s it’s not a bad thing to play with stocks for knowledgeable purposes, but once you reach that pre-retirement phase there are a lot of great solutions that you only have access to when you are working with an advisor. So that’s something that we have helped a lot of people with recently.

We had a lady come into our office for the first time. After the first appointment, we set up a second appointment with her, but then she was going to opt-out of coming in for that second appointment where we actually put together a full-blown retirement income plan with all of our recommendations for insurance and investments. I spoke with her and she said she talked to the TSP people and they said, “You can just take the money out yourself and reallocate it,” which isn’t false information, it just wasn’t the complete story. And that’s something that Abe was going to explain in the second appointment.

There are pros and cons to every plan and investment you have and the TSP surely isn’t perfect. In fact, it only has five options for someone to choose from. Eventually, Shelly was able to convince her of that and get her to come in for that second appointment where we gave her all of our recommendations.

The point here is, any individual can benefit from hearing the specifics and having all of their questions answered so that they can make an informed decision.